INOX Air Products Brand Guidelines: A 1963 Pune Oxygen Firm and a 1999 Indo-American Venture

A Pune oxygen maker, then a joint venture.

INOX Air Products began as a family business in western India. English Wikipedia and the company’s own 2026 fact sheet agree that it was established in 1963 by the Jain family as the Industrial Oxygen Company in Pune, Maharashtra. The fact sheet says the aim was to serve the rapid industrialisation then under way in the country.

The present name dates from 1999. In that year, both sources say, the American industrial gas company Air Products and Chemicals acquired a 50 percent stake, and a new company, INOX Air Products, was formed. The company describes the arrangement as one of the longest Indo-American partnerships in Indian manufacturing; that is its own claim. The venture has not been unwound: in March 2026 the Free Press Journal, citing Reuters, still described INOX Air Products as a joint venture between Air Products and India’s INOX Group, and English Wikipedia places it in the INOX Group of companies.

The company is headquartered in Mumbai, according to English Wikipedia, and it refers to itself in its own material as INOXAP. English Wikipedia describes its business as the manufacture, trading and supply of industrial and medical gases, among them oxygen, nitrogen, argon and hydrogen, as well as specialty gas mixtures.

Air separation units, tankers and pipelines.

English Wikipedia lists several of INOX Air Products’ larger sites, most of them air separation units: an air separation unit at the Bokaro Steel Plant, three units at Hazira built in partnership with ArcelorMittal, an ultra-high-purity oxygen plant at Modinagar in Uttar Pradesh and a plant at Sriperumbudur in Tamil Nadu. In West Bengal, the same article says, the company supplied medical oxygen to hospitals using a fleet of cryogenic tankers, and during the COVID-19 pandemic it supplied medical oxygen to hospitals across India.

Its size is quoted differently from year to year. English Wikipedia gives a combined capacity of more than 3,300 tonnes a day of liquid gases as of 2021. The company’s 2026 fact sheet gives a figure above 4,700 tonnes a day from more than 52 operating locations, with a workforce of more than 1,650. The trade magazine Machine Maker, in February 2026, put capacity above 6,000 tonnes a day across more than 50 locations.

Recent contracts show where the business is heading. In November 2025 Machine Maker reported a multi-year agreement to supply ultra-high-purity nitrogen to Grew Energy’s planned solar-cell plant at Narmadapuram in Madhya Pradesh, by a dedicated pipeline from INOXAP’s existing air separation unit there. In February 2026 the magazine reported a deal to build an onsite nitrogen plant, on a build, own and operate basis, for TACC Limited’s new graphite-anode factory at Dewas. In June 2026 it reported a 15-year agreement with INA Solar for ultra-high-purity nitrogen, again by pipeline at Narmadapuram. Solar cells, battery materials and electronics now sit beside steel and hospitals as customers.

The detail in those reports shows the scale of the work. The Grew Energy plant was described as a 3-gigawatt solar photovoltaic cell factory, due to start production in early 2026. The TACC factory at Dewas is to make battery-grade graphite anode material for electric vehicles and energy storage. The INA Solar agreement, with a subsidiary of Insolation Energy, covers a 4.5-gigawatt cell plant and a supply of 2,400 cubic metres of nitrogen an hour, Machine Maker reported. In each case the gas travels by pipe or is made on site rather than arriving by truck, and the company’s head of strategy and business development presented the deals as part of India’s push to build more of its own solar and electronics supply chain.

Cylinders, tanks and the plant at night.

Industrial gas companies sell something nobody sees. Oxygen, nitrogen, argon, carbon dioxide and hydrogen are colourless, so the identity of a gas supplier has to live on the things that hold and move the product: the cylinder, the storage tank, the delivery truck and the plant where air is separated into its parts.

The cylinder is the most familiar object in the category. Rows of steel and aluminium bottles, their shoulders painted in colours that identify the contents, appear in almost every supplier’s photography, often chained in racks at a welding shop or a filling plant. Beside them stand the larger forms of the trade: white or pale-grey bulk tanks outside factories and hospitals, and long tanker trucks that carry liquefied gases from plant to customer, usually wearing the supplier’s name and colours along the side.

The plants themselves have become an image of their own. An air-separation unit is a tall column, often wrapped in cladding and pipework, that cools air until its components can be drawn off one by one. Photographed at night, lit against a dark sky, these columns give the sector its most dramatic pictures, and many companies use them in annual reports and on their home pages.

The human scenes are fewer and more settled. A welder behind a mask in a shower of sparks stands for the industrial side; a hospital corridor or a patient at home with an oxygen concentrator stands for the medical side. Between the hardware and those two scenes, most of the visual language of the category is set. The brands in this guide work within that shared vocabulary, and what separates them is largely the name on the truck and the colour of the paint.

A venture that grew by buying out a rival’s share.

INOX Air Products has also grown through the reshaping of its larger rivals. English Wikipedia says Belloxy was a joint venture between Linde and INOX Air Products. When Linde planned its merger with Praxair, the Competition Commission of India directed it to sell its share in that venture to address competition concerns; in 2020, the article says, Linde’s board approved the sale and Belloxy became a wholly owned subsidiary of INOX Air Products.

The next step under discussion is a public listing. On 31 March 2026 the Free Press Journal, citing a Reuters report, wrote that INOX Air Products was planning an initial public offering in India and had appointed Kotak Mahindra Capital, JPMorgan and Citi to manage it, with a draft prospectus expected to be filed with the market regulator, Sebi. The same report described the company as serving customers across chemicals, pharmaceuticals, steel and textiles from close to 50 locations. Until any listing happens, the company remains a private joint venture.

The name itself carries both parents. “INOX” is the name of the Indian group, and “Air Products” is the American partner that has held half the company since 1999; the short form INOXAP joins them.

For a design guide, INOX Air Products shows how a joint venture can build one identity from two parent names and keep it for more than a quarter of a century. Compare Air Products, the American partner, and Linde, whose former stake in Belloxy passed to INOXAP. For this guide we use a deep teal, a marigold and a cotton white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep INOX Air Products’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.