Mr. B.Sivasankar, GM, Sales & Marketing, India & Middle East, PMP.
As the market is becoming competitive, OEMs are looking for intelligent solutions to improve productivity and safety of equipment; how is PMP helping OEMs to achieve this?
Helping OEMs increase productivity and safety of their equipment is one the main targets of PMP. For instance, we are helping European OEMs to supply additional safety features on transit mixers. At the Bauma Munich in April we presented the “MY” control, which allows our standard manual controlled closed loop pump to have additional safety built in: 1) avoid the possibility of turning on the engine while the pump is away from its zero position, thus avoiding dangerous machine start-up after the emergency button has been hit 2) allow rapid de-stroke for drum stop option either in normal work or emergency. This feature could soon be requested also on transit mixers in the Indian market.
Sustainability is one of the elements our engineers keep in mind when developing PMP solutions: we keep on working in the direction of increased efficiency, reduced noise in operation, reduced fuel consumption in order to increase savings for the customers, and reduce the impact on the environment.
As an Application Specialist, what are the equipment segments PMP is currently catering to and what new product line is it planning to launch in the near future in India?
In India, we have always offered our full range of products especially for sectors such as concrete industry, earth moving, material handling, road construction, AG & forestry; at global level, we are more and more seen as a full system supplier, i.e. a company able to provide a system instead of a sum of components. Currently in India, we are manufacturing products for mixer trucks and soil compactors. In the next step, we will start producing solutions for the hydraulic excavators and the harvesters’ manufacturers segment.
How is PMP positioned to address the client’s needs for timely availability of its offerings and competitive pricing?
Lean organization, strong vertical integration of the production chain (forgings, castings and final products are indeed all manufactured internally) and a localization process of some key components started already in 2011. All of these together allow PMP to present the market a very competitive offer in terms of pricing and of lead times as compared to the competitors.
We are proceeding according to the plan: starting from the products where the demand was higher. In the next year, we will start the production of gearboxes for wheeled and crawler applications. We have very important projects in progress that can grant us the volumes necessary for starting these productions.
How does PMP expect 2016 to pan out? What are its growth prospects for 2017 and beyond in India? Which equipment segments do you see growth for your products in the coming years?
2016 has been an extremely good year in India, less at global level because of the prolonged lack of growth in countries affected by the low oil level prices (Russia, South America, Middle East). These last months of the year have anyway shown some sign of increase also in those countries. We expect our Indian market will keep on growing in the next years with a continuous pace in all the sectors as in 2016.
What are PMP’s new initiatives to increase sales and strengthen its network?
Having regard to the revenue growth and the business, we will definitely strengthen our sales and after-sales departments. It will happen both through internal implementation and the selection of some specialized dealers. In this way, we will be able to cover all the areas and segments of the Indian market.
How does PMP initiate knowledge sharing in order to help customers achieve their target/goal?
As a solution and system supplier it is essential that we work closer and closer to customers in order to understand their needs and explain their potential advantages which can be achieved with the use of our technology. For instance, we are working on reducing weight, dimensions and cost of closed loop transmission systems for several applications in collaboration with our customers. PMP believes that cooperation and knowledge sharing is a very important key factor in order to create successful projects that are able to bring advantages to the customers
NBM&CW December 2016
