The Tiny Titans Holding India’s Vehicles Together: Inside Sterling Tools

Karishma Shah
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Karishma Shah
Co-founder of Exceptional Technology. Karishma leads editorial and operations for exceptional.technology — the showcase of the best of Indian technology and engineering — and co-runs Excep...
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Every vehicle rolling off an Indian assembly line — a two-wheeler, a family car, a truck, a tractor — is held together by hundreds of small steel parts that most of us will never see. Bolts, nuts, screws and studs, each one forged to exacting strength, each one doing a job where failure is not an option. A large share of those fasteners are made in Faridabad, Haryana, by a company that has quietly perfected this craft for over four decades: Sterling Tools Limited.

Sterling Tools was incorporated in 1979, and commissioned its first fasteners plant at DLF Industrial Estate, Faridabad, in 1981. From that single plant, the company says, it has grown into India’s second-largest fastener manufacturer — a high-tensile, cold-forged fastener specialist supplying vehicle makers across India and tier-one component makers in the USA, Europe, South America and the Middle East.

Four plants, one obsession with precision

The company’s journey reads like a map of Indian manufacturing itself. After Faridabad came a second wire-drawing plant at Ballabgarh in 1999, a third fasteners plant at Prithla (Palwal) in 2004, and a fourth plant in Bengaluru in 2019. Today, the company says, its four state-of-the-art facilities at Faridabad, Ballabgarh, Palwal and Bengaluru run the full chain in-house — from raw-material inspection and wire drawing, through cold forging, thread rolling, heat treatment and surface coating, to optical sorting and dispatch.

That in-house control is the heart of the Sterling story. The company says its multi-station headers, from 3 to 5 stations, cover fasteners from M5 to M28 in both standard and special products, while its SCADA-controlled continuous heat-treatment lines and fully automatic surface-finishing lines give every bolt, screw and nut its strength, durability and corrosion resistance. Finished fasteners pass through optical sorting machines with multiple cameras, and the company says it offers 100% inspection on its sorting machines for M6, M8 and M10 parts — a zero-defect discipline, applied millions of times a day.

Sterling Tools thread rolling shop floor
Sterling Tools thread rolling shop floor (company official photo)

The fasteners inside every segment

Sterling’s range spans the whole vehicle. Standard fasteners, special fasteners, chassis fasteners and engine fasteners — socket head cap screws, hexagonal head bolts, studs, hexagon nuts, weld nuts, hub and wheel bolts, suspension bolts, propeller shaft bolts and nuts, cylinder head bolts and connecting rod bolts among them. The company says it serves every automotive segment: two-wheelers, passenger vehicles, commercial vehicles, farm equipment and off-road vehicles, along with the replacement market and general engineering, consumer durables and railways.

The customer list the company has built over 45 years reads like a roll call of Indian motoring, and in 2024 it added Hyundai Motors to its customer base. Behind that breadth sits a team the company describes as 2,000 strong — engineers, metallurgists and shop-floor specialists keeping a four-and-a-half-decade legacy of precision manufacturing moving forward.

Riding the electric shift

Sterling has moved with the industry’s biggest transition as well. In 2020, through its wholly owned subsidiary Sterling Gtake E-Mobility — now Sterling E-Mobility Solutions — it commissioned its first motor control unit (MCU) manufacturing plant at Faridabad, and the company says it has since grown MCU capacity to 600,000 units a year. In 2021-22 the subsidiary secured an order worth Rs 600 crore from a leading Indian electric two-wheeler maker, and added ten more manufacturers to its order book.

The electric story keeps accelerating. In 2024, through its subsidiary Sterling Tech-Mobility, the company partnered with GLVAC YT to manufacture advanced high-voltage DC contactors and relays in India for electric and hybrid vehicles. In May 2025 it signed a technology licensing agreement with the UK’s Advanced Electric Machines to manufacture rare-earth magnet-free traction motors in India — a pioneering step for the country’s EV supply chain. And in September 2025 its EV arm partnered with China’s Landworld Technology to locally manufacture on-board chargers, DC/DC converters and multi-function units at its Faridabad EV campus, a partnership the company says is projected to generate around Rs 450 crore in business by FY30. In January 2026 came a partnership with MINIEYE for advanced driver-assistance solutions in India.

A scale worth celebrating

Sterling Tools Faridabad plant exterior
Sterling Tools Faridabad plant (company official photo)

The numbers tell the story of that growth. The company says its consolidated total income reached Rs 1,038 crore in the financial year 2024-25, with consolidated profit after tax of Rs 58.3 crore — the result of more than four decades of steady, engineering-led expansion from its Faridabad roots.

From a 1979 Faridabad start-up to India’s second-largest fastener maker — and now a rising force in electric-vehicle power electronics — Sterling Tools shows what Indian manufacturing does at its best: take the smallest, hardest parts of a problem, master them completely, and keep raising the bar. The best engineering is often the engineering you never see, holding everything together, millions of times over.

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Co-founder of Exceptional Technology. Karishma leads editorial and operations for exceptional.technology — the showcase of the best of Indian technology and engineering — and co-runs Excep Technology, a Pune-based creative and technology studio.
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