Schwing Stetter India has consistently maintained its market leadership in the concrete machinery segment for many years. What has been the key to this leadership and what are you doing to further consolidate this position?
We have the first mover advantage as we were the first ones to start manufacturing concreting equipments in India and our focus was to bring down the cost of the products. Our main focuses are on indigenisation of our products and on making it user friendly for our customers. Our sales and service engineers constantly interact with our customers and get their feedback on performance, ease of operation, etc.
Whatever changes that are suggested, we try to incorporate in our equipment. This has helped us in broad basing our customers. In addition to that, we focus a lot on after sales service, parts availability, parts supply, etc. Besides this we also focus on customer training for getting the best out of our equipments. I strongly believe these are some of the points which put us ahead of the competition.
It has been almost three years since Schwing Stetter India's parent Company Schwing GmbH was acquired by China's Xuzhou Construction Machinery Group (XCMG). Has that had any impact on your operations?
XCMG has invested in the Holding company, which holds the majority of our Parent company Schwing GmBH. We continue to be 100 percent subsidiary of Schwing GmBH, and we continue to operate in the same way as in the past.
According to CII - like the automotive industry - the construction equipment industry would soon position India as a global hub for manufacturing, design, R&D and components outsourcing. Do you see this happening?
Most of the construction equipment manufacturers in India are either 100 percent subsidiaries or they are joint venture companies. Being a part of a global MNC, most of us have territorial restrictions. In the last 10 years or so, the Indian manufacturers have substantially upgraded the quality of their product and many companies in India have also started exporting the Indian manufactured product out of India, especially to the East Asian market, African countries, etc.
We are no exception to that. In the last few years we have been exporting our products outside India because our parent company has the confidence that we are able to produce quality equipments for the export market where it (parent company) is unable to compete. I think going forward Indian manufacturers will have more opportunities to export to other countries as well.
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