While our journey so far has been lined with numerous milestones, our biggest and most significant one has been that of crossing the golden mark of becoming a 500 crore company.
Creating customer value is the top-most priority for our business. It requires a customer centric attitude; an attitude which looks at business from a customer's point of view, rather looking at a customer from the business point of view. To fulfil the vision to create and deliver value to our key customers, we embarked upon an exercise to redesign our organizational structure, both in OEM and Auto-refinish businesses and launched the Body-Shop Servicing and Key Account Management initiatives.
People are our most cherished asset and our primary resource in the creation of business advantage. Towards becoming a preferred employer in the Automotive Coatings Industry, we undertook many HR initiatives, employee training and development programmes.
We have made significant improvements in our capabilities in the plant, technology and supply chain. Most importantly, we now have a world-class plant for the manufacture of OE products. We offer a diverse range of products, have localized a vast majority of what we supply to our customers, and produce much of our requirement of intermediates in-house. Our market shares both in the OE and the refinish business have risen steadily. We are now the company with the largest share in the Auto-refinish market and have considerably improved our standing as the second largest company in the OE market.
As we move forward, we see new opportunities and challenges ahead. We are fortunate to be placed in one of the fastest growing regions in the world today. New customers and expansion by existing customers are leading to an exciting pace which will only accelerate in the years to come. Naturally, this has attracted more competition and several new players have entered the market. Customer expectations have also moved up significantly, and will continue to do so as our market rushes to meet the demands of this global village.
Asian PPG has strengths which place it in a unique position to address the challenges of the future. We have access to the considerable resources of our parent companies - one with a leading global position in terms of customer insights, relationships, technology, product range and capabilities in the segments that we serve; and the other with excellent local knowledge, market network, technical and IT skills and manufacturing capability. Our parent companies have consistently supported Asian PPG’s growth initiatives and re-invested most of the earnings back in the business to fund growth.
We are ready, prepared and looking forward to cross even more significant milestones in the future and we want to do it in partnership with our valued customers through our most cherished asset: our people.