Mr. Tushar Mehendale, Managing Director, Electromech
What is your view on the growth of the construction equipment industry in the wake of the government’s focus on infrastructure development?
We welcome the renewed thrust on all the infrastructure projects that are being launched across various sectors. This is going to provide an overall boost to the requirement of not only construction equipment but also for steel, cement and other commodities and items. Overall, this is proving to be very positive for the market. The demand in the market is slowly but surely increasing and it bodes well for all the players in the industry. India had unfortunately been limping around for the past several years with tepid growth. We have been patiently waiting for a revival as we are capable of addressing a much higher demand than what exists in the market today. Hence, we are highly excited as we look forward to catering to a sustained inflow of orders and help our customers with fast deliveries.
Is the CE sector fully geared to usher in GST from April 2017? How do you see the impact of it on the industry?
GST will make life extremely easy for the CE sector. Currently, there is a skewed indirect taxation structure that makes selling equipment to people very difficult in the construction sector across different parts of the country. The draconian C-Form is one of the vestiges from the past and so are issues related to the end-customer being able to take a credit of the tax paid on equipment they are using for their projects on which they charge VAT. Furthermore, unscrupulous players from the unorganized sector are able to bend the current taxation rules to their benefit and gain an unfavourable advantage. GST will eliminate (hopefully) all these hurdles and create a level playing field.
The scope of work is becoming wider, the complexity of projects is increasing, and the time lines are shrinking. Hence, the trend is definitely towards equipment that delivers high throughput with high reliability suitably customized to the specific project requirements. The shrinking timeslines also shrink the mobilization time of our customer. Hence, there is now increased pressure on delivering equipment in shorter time frames. At ElectroMech, we are proud of our solutions approach and have been helping our clients execute complex projects with high productivity machines for the past several decades. Furthermore, our state-of-the-art facilities combined with lean manufacturing principles, allow us to deliver equipment on time, every time.
Strong after-sales service and spare parts availability are also key selling points. How is your company strengthening its position in these areas?
At ElectroMech, we recognize the immense importance of having a strong after-sales service set-up. Our services subsidiary, Cranedge, has been established specifically to address this services gap in the market dominated by products. Cranedge customers benefit from the long experience of ElectroMech and can rely on maximum uptime for their equipment along with drastically low response time. We have close to 150 technicians supporting cranes across India and the Middle East.
What will be the company’s focus during its participation at bauma Conexpo India 2016?
bC India 2016 is being held on the background of increased spend in the construction equipment sector. Hence, we are sure that we will be meeting a lot of new customers at this show, which will also allow us to reinforce our relations with our existing customers. This opportune timing also bodes well from point of view of generating serious enquiries for the equipment and I am sure, this will be a busy show for all the participants.
What products and services will be launched/displayed at the show? Kindly highlight the USPs of one of your newly introduced products.
We will be exhibiting both our group companies at bc India – ElectroMech and Zoomlion-ElectroMech. At the ElectroMech booth visitors will get to experience our huge range of industry leading material handling equipment and get to chat with our solutions experts present there. We will be showcasing our installations across the world and interacting with our existing and new customers and understanding as to how we can help them with our solutions to solve their material handling problems.
At the Zoomlion-ElectroMech booth visitors will get to experience our wide range of tower cranes and latest range of passenger hoists for high rise construction. We are also showcasing several marquee installations that we have done across different sites in India.
NBM&CW December 2016
