Akhilesh Kumar, Product Group Head, LG System Air-conditioning DivisionThe pandemic has created a lot of challenges and opportunities for the HVAC Industry. The industry is grappling with customers in many segments slowing down their investments due to uncertainity post lockdowns, “and has also created health and hygiene concern for our frontline sales and service team,” says Akhilesh Kumar, Product Group Head, LG System Air-conditioning Division. “This is an opportunity for our industry to reinforce indoor air quality and ventilation inside air-conditioning spaces by designing and executing in the most efficient way. It has also created opportunities for providing an increased level of intellegence in our products and monitor them remotely,” he adds.The company is witnessing significant increase in the pipeline in both VRF and other light commercial product segments. How do you see VRF Technology adapting in the Indian market?VRF market is growing at more than 12 per cent CAGR YoY. We are now witnessing VRF technology being adopted in all segments such as residential, retail, healthcare, hotel. In large projects too (above 1,000 hp), especially vertical segments of hotels and hospitals, customers have started preferring VRF products over chillers. It has begun replacing smaller scroll and screw chillers in many segments. Globally, we have seen a lot of improvements in energy efficiency of VRF.Tell us about innovations created by LG that will set a benchmark for others to follow.Even during the pandemic, in the last quarter of 2020, we launched our 5th Generation VRF (Multi V 5), a product of our state-of-the-art Pune factory. Our new VRF units are with black fins, inbuilt oil sensor, duel sensing mode. On our commitment of providing clean air, we have introduced indoor with air purification kit with PM 1.0 level filtration, human detection. We have also introduced Total Management Solution (TMS), which provides Cloud-base remote monitoring for our VRF system. We have seen positive response in the last few months.LG moved from fixed to inverter range…Cooling is the fastest growing use of energy in smart buildings, and hence, investing in energy efficient product is must. Eco-friendly inverter compressor technology can save power and future energy demands and help reduce emissions. LG took an early lead in 2016 and decided to move its complete line up from fixed speed to inverter, and hence, all are our AC products – Hi Wall Splits, Light commercial pdts and entire VRF (Multi V) – converted to 100 per cent inverter. Even our fan motors are BLDC, which provides huge energy saving with faster payback.Your ThinQ technology created a buzz in the market…LG ThinQ technology is built on an open platform, so it will work with evolving smart technologies and devices for years to come. The technology allows you to balance your variety task by usage of simple app. All our smart appliances have Wi-Fi-enabled feature and one app to manage all of them. LG makes managing your smart appliance easy.(Communication by the management of the company)