He is known to be a game changer in the Indian trucking business. At a time when no one thought of challenging the traditional dominance of two home-grown giants in this industry, Anirudh Bhuwalka, MD and CEO, AMW Ltd carved out a niche by introducing a completely new segment - premium tippers.
His value proposition with the new dimensions of owner's pride and operator's comfort appealed to Indian customers and soon enough AMW was the third largest truck manufacturing company in the business. The 2011-12 numbers are testimony to the fact. And then the entire Indian commercial vehicles industry was hit hard, really hard.
Obviously, AMW also suffered a major setback in terms of numbers. But the spirit was never lost. And with things starting to turn around with the economy, he is all set to bounce back with new enthusiasm and a new looking AMW. In fact, it is in these difficult two and half years that Anirudh has been scripting the new chapter of revival.
"There is no secret that our focus has been on construction and mining and we were enjoying almost a 23 percent market share in the premium segment of the tippers. As the construction and mining segment came off grid, the market completely came down over the last thirty months," he says, recalling that period. The overall TIV (total industry volume) halved and even the tipper market in particular took a larger beating given the overall slowdown.
Consolidation
So to mitigate the risk, AMW went to banks and got its loans restructured for a longer tenure so that the cash flow in the short term was not affected. Importantly, the company utilised the rough phase to iron out operational issues and for consolidating the product portfolio.
In a message to his team in through the company's in-house newsletter dated September 2013, Anirudh said "We believe that the best time to develop products and improve product performance is now and besides introducing 15 new vehicles and 22 variants, we can confidently say that we have improved fuel efficiency by an average 10 percent across our range." And yes, it did happen. If you look at 2011-12 when AMW was at the peak of its volumes in the construction and mining segment, the Company did not have any presence in the haulage segment at all. It had some premium products but it did not have anything to address the 85 percent of the total truck market.
"In the last two years, we really focussed on developing the complete haulage range of products including a mass market tipper. We were always positioned in the premium segment of the game but we were not addressing the bulk of the pyramid at all because we were the only players at the top-end of the segment.
(Continued on the next page)
