Asahi India Glass Brand Guidelines: AIS, a 1984 Joint Venture With AGC and Maruti

A 1984 joint venture.

Asahi India Glass, which trades as AIS, began as a joint venture. English Wikipedia says the company was incorporated in 1984 as Indian Auto Safety Glass Private Limited, under an agreement between the B. M. Labroo family, the Japanese glass maker Asahi Glass Co. — now AGC — and Maruti Udyog, the car maker now called Maruti Suzuki India. It became a public limited company, Asahi India Safety Glass Limited, on 31 December 1985, Wikipedia says. A company press release distributed by ANI and NewsVoir in November 2022 gives a different starting point, saying AIS “started in 1987”; Wikipedia’s 1984 date is the year of incorporation.

Its first customer was one of its own shareholders. At first, Wikipedia says, the company made toughened glass only for Maruti; from 1989 it supplied other car makers as well, and by 1992 it had moved into laminated windshields. By 1999 Wikipedia lists Hyundai, Ford, Toyota and Hindustan Motors among its customers.

The company took its present name in 2002, becoming Asahi India Glass Limited, Wikipedia says. In the same years it absorbed Float Glass India, a subsidiary of Asahi Glass, which became an AIS subsidiary in 2001; the merger of the two companies was approved in 2003, with AIS then holding 79.6 per cent of Float Glass India. With it, AIS added float glass to its automotive business. Its registered office is in New Delhi and its corporate office in Gurugram, in Haryana, Wikipedia says.

Three businesses, many names.

AIS organises itself into three businesses: automotive glass, architectural glass and consumer glass, Wikipedia says. Its website groups its automotive products under brand names such as Lamisafe for laminated windshields and Temperlite for tempered side and back glass, and also lists building and construction products and an industrial segment for white goods and for construction and farm equipment. The consumer side carries the most brand names: the website lists AIS Windows, a doors-and-windows business, AIS Glasxperts, AIS Windshield Experts and Car Fit Experts, alongside subsidiaries for distribution and adhesives.

Its factories are spread across India. Wikipedia counts 13 manufacturing plants and sub-assembly units, with automotive glass made at Bawal in Haryana, Roorkee in Uttarakhand, Chennai in Tamil Nadu and Taloja in Maharashtra. It opened an automotive glass plant in Chennai in 2003, an architectural processing unit at Taloja in 2004 and further processing units at Rewari and Chennai in 2006, and in November 2017 it began making float glass at a new plant at Taloja, which Wikipedia says was built to produce 550 tonnes of glass a day.

The Maruti link shaped its newest site. In May 2017 the Press Trust of India reported that AIS would build a greenfield automotive glass plant in Gujarat, mainly to supply Maruti Suzuki’s new Gujarat factory; PTI said the first phase was planned to make one million laminated glasses and 1.2 million sets of tempered glass a year, and Wikipedia places the site near Mehsana.

AIS also reaches out to architects. In November 2022 it announced the fourth edition of the AIS Design Olympiad, a competition for architecture students from across India, with regional rounds held online and a final in Mumbai; that year’s entrants were asked to design green buildings for hospitals, hotels or schools. In 2007, Wikipedia says, the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers awarded AIS Auto Glass the Deming Application Prize, a quality-management award.

Design and documentation.

Glass makers sell mainly to builders, carmakers and bottlers rather than to shoppers, and their brand pages are written for those buyers. The material does much of the visual work. Many of the large producers fill their websites and annual reports with photographs of their own float lines, furnaces and forming machines, shot and published the way each company chooses, next to close-ups of finished sheets, windscreens and bottles.

Product pages tend to follow the three big markets. Architectural ranges cover clear and tinted float glass, coated glass for solar control and insulation, laminated glass and mirrors, each usually with a range name and a technical data sheet. Automotive pages describe windscreens, side and roof glass, and glass with heating, acoustic layers or head-up-display areas. Container makers show bottles and jars by capacity, colour and finish, often with catalogue pages of standard shapes for wine, beer, spirits and food.

Colour belongs to the catalogue as much as to the logo. Flat-glass makers publish swatches for body tints and reflective coatings, and packaging makers name their glass colours, such as flint, amber and green, and show the same bottle shape in each. Corporate pages carry a second kind of identity: maps of plants, lists of countries, ownership histories and stock-market listings, which matter in an industry where many groups have grown by buying or merging with other glassworks.

The guides in this group read those public materials: founding records, owners, plants and product families, as the companies and independent sources describe them. The colours and type samples shown here are our own interpretation, not official brand assets, and no product or mark is reproduced.

Founding partners still on the register.

The founding partners are still on the share register. In the shareholding pattern AIS published on its website for the quarter ended 30 September 2026, AGC Inc. held about 21.2 per cent and Maruti Suzuki India about 10.6 per cent, both classed as members of the promoter group; members of the Labroo family and a promoter trust made up the rest of that group, which held 51.57 per cent in total. The remaining shares are held by the public. In 2017 PTI quoted the managing director and chief executive, Sanjay Labroo, describing a “symbiotic relationship” with Maruti Suzuki.

The company describes itself in strong terms. Its 2022 release said AIS held more than 74 per cent of India’s passenger car glass segment and more than 45 per cent of the architectural value-added glass segment; those are the company’s own figures. Two dated reports show its recent course. In January 2026 pv magazine reported that a subsidiary of Adani Green Energy had signed agreements to supply AIS with 20.8 megawatts of solar and wind power from a hybrid project at Khavda in Gujarat, with AIS to take at least 26 per cent of the project’s equity under India’s captive power rules. In August 2026 India’s Directorate General of Foreign Trade set a minimum import price on clear float glass from 4 to 12 millimetres thick for one year, and PTI, in a report carried by The Hindu, said the measure could benefit domestic producers including Saint-Gobain and Asahi India.

The brand works on two levels. The full name, Asahi India Glass, carries the link to its Japanese partner; the three letters AIS are what the company uses in its sub-brands, from AIS Windows to AIS Glasxperts, and on its website, aisglass.com.

For a design guide, Asahi India Glass shows how a joint venture can build a home-market brand of its own while keeping its partners’ names in view. Compare AGC, its Japanese shareholder, and Saint-Gobain, another float glass producer in India. For this guide we use a windshield slate and a midnight blue with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Asahi India Glass’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.