When CCTY first entered the Indian market in 2017, it wasn’t just a new operation, it was a blank slate. Leading that effort required vision, resilience, and a willingness to build from the ground up. In this conversation, CCTY India’s Managing Director Mitul Dave, shares what it took to establish the brand, the mindset behind building a high-performing team, and how those early experiences continue to shape the company’s growth today.
You’ve helped shape CCTY India’s growth from the opening of the branch. What were some early challenges in building the India operation, and how did those experiences shape your leadership philosophy?
Setting up CCTY’s India operations in year 2017 was both exciting as well as challenging. After having more than two decades of experience in Indian bearing industry representing a well renowned brand, it was a completely different experience for me to represent and promote a very young and dynamic CCTY brand which was relatively unknown to the Indian customers.
The first challenge was to build a team with a clear focus on business development because we were starting with almost zero base in Indian market. This required lot of patience and perseverance as we had to carve our own path. I must admit here that we could successfully built a high-performance and result oriented team having right experience and strong desire to take up challenging roles. As a business leader, my role was to keep the motivation high in our team with clear focus on promoting CCTY core products in our core markets, while encouraging positive work culture.
CCTY being a niche product and niche market segment company, the biggest challenge was to identify right customers for our products. It required extensive market research and exploration. This wasn’t an easy journey, and we focused all our energy to identify right market for us in India. My role was to lead from the front and actively get involved with our sales and engineering team in entire process chain…starting from identifying relevant markets, visiting new customers, following up in RFQ generation, reaching to technical and commercial agreements, chasing for sample orders, sample submission, bench tests and field trials, product approvals and finally getting series supply orders….this entire journey at each new OEM account was full of excitement, anxiety, hope and rigorous follow-ups.
We thoroughly enjoyed this journey as a team, celebrated each success, and have learnt from each failure. I can say that my role has also evolved during this journey now focusing more on strategizing, establishing internal systems, and facilitating the resource allocation to help achieve our targets.
What are the most important operational principles you’ve worked to instill in the Indian team?
In my view, the most important operational principle required to be a successful team is “entrepreneurship”, whereby each member of the team owns up the responsibility of his/her assigned work area and always tries to align the resources towards company’s goals. This works in a synergic way only if responsibility and accountability go hand in hand. I have always tried to instill the principle of “being responsible as well as accountable” in our CCTY India team and encouraged freedom of work. This empowers individuals to escape traditional corporate boundaries and execute work with personal passion and innovation rather than employer mandates. I have also encouraged the principle of “sharing information” among the team members so that everyone is sensitized and aligned in the same direction.
What specific skills or mindsets do you believe are critical for employees to succeed at CCTY today?
As I mentioned earlier, CCTY is a niche product and niche market segment company. We operate with a corporate philosophy of being among top three suppliers globally in whichever product and industry segments we cater to. We believe in being specialists, not generalists. A CCTY employee must carry this mindset while representing CCTY brand and always try to create our own space rather than trying to find a “me too” kind of market. This is easier to say rather than do because it requires lot of patience, perseverance and conviction while approaching customers.
Moreover, CCTY operates only with OEMs which is a highly demanding segment in terms of product quality, cost competitiveness, engineering and delivery services. A CCTY employee must imbibe this philosophy to be able to succeed and achieve customer delight.
What makes customer expectations in the Indian market unique, and how has CCTY adapted to meet them?
Indian market is a highly competitive market where each customer must continually keep innovating to offer unique product solutions. Parallelly, every customer tries to do value engineering to bring down the overall cost.
With Indian government’s increased capital allocation and spending on infrastructure projects, almost all multinational OEMs in construction, agriculture, material handling, and automotive sectors have entered Indian market and expanded their R&D and manufacturing footprints. Many of CCTY’s global OEM customers have also entered Indian market and it becomes imperative for us to provide same levels of engineering and delivery services locally.
Over past nine years since our inception in India, we have established ourselves as a strong customer-centric company with major focus on product quality, engineering, and seamless delivery services. We enjoy top vendor ratings at almost all customers we cater to.
From your perspective, what truly differentiates CCTY in the motion control space when compared to the competition?
What truly differentiates CCTY compared to the competition is “agility.” We are closely engaged with the engineering teams of our OEM customers, who are continuously working towards innovation, new product launches, value analysis and value engineering. As an engineering-driven company, we are very prompt in our response to customer queries and requests for techno-commercial proposals, drawing approval, life calculation, sample submission, and product validations. This high engineering focus, coupled with delivery and strong commitment towards customer service, truly differentiates CCTY.
Where do you see the biggest opportunity for CCTY to further strengthen its value proposition over the next three to five years?
Today, CCTY India is a proud supplier to major off-highway equipment producers as well as gearbox and hydraulic cylinder OEMs, supplying our core products like planetary bearings, large size angular contact bearings and spherical plain bearings. We have also made inroads into automotive applications and started catering our best-in-class self-lubricating bushings to shock absorber and belt tensioner applications in India. Going forward, we plan to further consolidate our position into these high-volume applications and set up local manufacturing facility for bushings in India.
Humanoids is another application where CCTY is achieving global acceptance for its unique products like crossed roller bearings. India is also poised to enter humanoid segment in near future, and we will be able to leverage our position in this segment due to our presence at major humanoid companies in US and China market.
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