Mahabir. The manufacturer behind MMT Acoustix® and seven more acoustic brands

01 / The story

Four generations, one habit: learn the material first

1. 1968Agra

   A shop, and a name to live up to

   A single automobile spare-parts shop serving the replacement market. Purely trading. Nothing about it suggested what would follow.

2. 1973Two machines

   From trading to making

   Travelling across India put Mahabir Prasad Jain in front of a material still new to the country: polyurethane foam. He traded it, then stopped trading and started making, combining it with high-quality fabrics to manufacture two-wheeler and cycle saddle covers.

   Two sewing machines became ten, then fifty. In 1979 the company became an ancillary saddle manufacturer to Hero Cycles, its first relationship with a large manufacturer. By 1980 there were roughly two hundred machines.

If you understand a material deeply enough, you can create something more valuable from it.

1. 1986New Delhi

   Leaving behind what already worked

   The saddle-cover business was running at real volume and continuing would have been the easy decision. S. K. Jain wanted more technical products and more specialised manufacturing, so the family left Agra for New Delhi and a small apartment in Karol Bagh. Over time he acquired the entire block where Mahabir Multi Tech stands today.

We are leaving the city, our past, our relations, our comfort to start something big. I can only do this if you are ready to burn. There is no way back.

1. 1991Filtration

   Learn the technology before entering the market

   A Belgian company was supplying air-filtration media made from reticulated foam into India. Rather than enter the market without understanding it, S. K. Jain learned the manufacturing process and the application first. Indian production began in 1991 on raw materials imported from Belgium and the United Kingdom.

   By 1995 the company was an OEM supplier to Varroc and Kiran Udyog, at that time the largest air filter manufacturers in the country.

2. 2003Acoustics

   The conversation that changed the company

   Around 2000, meetings with Kirloskar and Sudhir Generators about air filters turned to a different problem in the genset industry: fire-rated acoustic foam. Unfamiliar territory, so the family did what it always did and learned the product.

   Foam was imported from Turkey at first. Then the material, its performance and its manufacturing were studied, and Indian production began in 2003. Between 2003 and 2009, under Ritu Jain and S. K. Jain, the company became a major supplier to the genset sector. The foundation for MMT Acoustix had been laid without anyone calling it that.

3. 2014MMT Acoustix

   Taking acoustics past the factory floor

   Sonit Jain joined in 2011 and inherited an established business with customers, manufacturing and industrial acoustics. He also inherited a pattern: every generation had taken what already existed and asked what could be built next.

   The question was whether professional acoustics could move beyond generator enclosures and plant rooms, and whether products understood only by consultants could be specified, bought and installed by everyone else. MMT Acoustix launched in 2014, built to run project supply and direct sales together, with specifications published openly rather than held back.

4. TodayPalwal

   Eight brands, one plant, one accountable supplier

   Absorption, isolation, low frequency, timber, textile and adhesive are all manufactured in house, which is why thicknesses, densities, colours and sizes can be made to a project requirement instead of a catalogue.