2025 marked 41 years for BMI Bearings, having evolved from an importer of bearings to a manufacturer-exporter from India, while staying family-owned by the second generation.
Understanding market trends and being able to change the direction of the company accordingly has been the key to success, and that’s exactly what BMI Bearings has done.
Back in 1974, Mr Snehal Sheth started the company with five years’ experience in the bearing business at an SKF authorised distributor in Mumbai. With that experience and a great deal of zeal, he started trading bearings, with all energy focused on sourcing obsolete and hard-to-find bearings. In the 1980s, as the customer base grew, he became involved in the import of bearings from Europe, as not much manufacturing existed locally in India. Moving forward to the late 1990s, the Indian government was encouraging local manufacturing, and BMI decided to set up a small plant in Gujarat, India, with the help of a retired FAG engineer. Fast forward to the year 2000, when the company received its first export order from a Polish distributor. This changed the entire business direction of the company, and it slowly began exporting to Germany, Italy, Slovakia, Denmark, Argentina, the USA and a few other Latin American countries.
Fast forward again to 2020, BMI Bearings opened an office in Charlotte, North Carolina, to support its biggest market, North America. Apart from standard roller bearings (spherical, taper, cylindrical and others), BMI has now expanded its range to mounted roller bearings (spherical – S2000 and tapered – Type E) as well.
“Today, as the market is saturated with factories from Asia, BMI Bearings analyses where it can bring value and has therefore diversified into non-standard and customised bearings, which major brands find difficult to serve due to size,” explains the management team.
BMI Bearings is proud to have been awarded for its exemplary export performance by the Engineering Export Promotion Council of India. BMI Bearings turned 41 in 2025, and it remains family-owned and run, staying highly attuned to what distributors need. Today, it offers a mix of customised and non-standard bearing solutions, along with stock of the standard catalogue range of roller bearings. BMI Bearings are looking forward to many more prosperous years.
Source: Best Bits
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