Tushar Mehendale, ElectroMech

Markets are always going to be competitive, but our wide product portfolio of Material Handling solutions that can be deployed across a wide range of projects, coupled with our solutions approach, allows us to win in such a competitive market.

Our business environment has evolved drastically

ElectroMech is a 38-year-old company, and I took over the reins about 17 years ago. Each year has been bringing new challenges and new achievements for the company. The business environment has evolved drastically, with periods of extremely high industry growth rates followed by periods of virtually no growth rate. This throws up a lot of challenges for the company, and addressing these challenges, makes running a business all the more interesting!

ElectroMech is present in a whole spectrum of material handling industry. Not only are we India’s leading manufacturers of industrial overhead cranes but also the sole partners for Yale forklifts in India.

Our JV with Zoomlion for Tower Cranes, further burnishes our position in the industry as the leading materials handling player with one of the most diversified product portfolio. We are getting a fantastic response to our JV with Zoomlion and we have emerged as the company of choice when it comes to higher SWL, heavy duty tower cranes.

Our long association with prestigious projects executed by the best infra companies has allowed us to hone our skills and fine tune our solutions

In mega infra projects like metro rail, bridges, and tunnel construction, movement of big precast segments and components is a critical job. Our long association with prestigious projects being executed by some of the best infrastructure companies in the industry, has allowed us to hone our skills and fine tune our solutions to suit the challenge. Our client list has almost all the major construction companies in India as well as of the Middle East.

We have manufactured thousands of gantry cranes for various applications. Handling precast segments is one of the prime requirements in infrastructure construction industry and several bridge and metro projects across the world have been built using our gantry cranes.

We are proud of our Solutions Approach and our engineers understand customers’ specific project requirements and craft custom solutions for each site. We do not believe in adopting a cookie-cutter approach as every site and every client has different requirements and expectations from the equipment.

Whatever projects are being executed are seeing a transition to newer construction methodologies that necessitate the use of tower cranes

Even though the real estate market has slowed down, it is interesting to note that construction methodologies are changing. Hence, even if the rate of growth of the real estate market is subdued, whatever projects are being executed are seeing a transition to newer construction methodologies that necessitate the use of tower cranes.

This is good for the tower crane industry as a whole, as currently, the total market size in India for tower cranes is miniscule when compared to countries like China. It is also a misplaced notion that tower cranes are used only in the real estate industry. The visibility afforded by tower cranes being used in the real estate industry is definitely higher, however, the real brutes work in the infrastructure industry – far away from the eyes of daily commuters. Even in this field, the construction methodologies are evolving at a fast clip and the sizes of tower cranes being deployed are increasing.

Markets are always going to be competitive, but our wide product portfolio of tower cranes that can be deployed across a wide range of projects, coupled with our solutions approach, allows us to win in such a competitive market.

Lifetime support for equipment is a non-negotiable customer requirement

ElectroMech started its after-sales service company ‘Cranedge 7’ years back, and it has been growing from strength to strength to emerge as the largest dedicated industrial crane service company in the country. Now, the same strength of Cranedge is being deployed to support our forklifts across the industry.

We believe in simple metrics of success when it comes to equipment services – do it fast and do it right the first time! Our experience of being a product company that does its own design engineering, helps us tackle the most difficult of problems in a cost-effective and timely manner. This benefits the customers hugely, as the downtime at their workplace is minimized and consequential losses are controlled.

We have exported our cranes to more than 50 countries

ElectroMech started exporting in 2002, and over the past 15 years, we have managed to export our cranes to more than 50 countries across the world. We are working at a feverish pace to ensure not only that the country count increases, but also the overall population of our cranes in each of these countries increases.

2017 saw marked increase in order books, more so from infrastructure construction

The GST tax reform was a highly anticipated event and this tax regime is going to be extremely beneficial to the country. Once we are past the teething issues, the GST regime will make business drastically smoother. Especially in the field of construction equipment, earlier our customers were not in a position to take a setoff on the Excise Duty and certain Sales Taxes and thus their landed costs were higher. Also on account of unequal state taxes, there was an issue related to purchases from certain state being cheaper than others purely on account of the tax value. Under GST, not only the customers benefit with they being able to get GST credit, but also the OEMs benefit as everyone works on a level playing field in a highly competitive market.

2017 saw a marked increase in the order books, more so from the infrastructure construction industry. We are happy to get associated with a lot of marquee projects across the country, and are looking forward to becoming a part of the growth cycle that investments in infrastructure industry lead to.