Volvo Trucks: Adapting to Evolving Markets
What new demands across global markets and that of India are impacting your business and what new solutions have you planned to meet user requirements?
Global markets, including India and other emerging countries, are passing through a rapid transition in infra development. Economic dynamics are also impacting infrastructure planning and finance for infra development. So, there is volatility in demand and intense pressure on operational margins. Customers want higher productivity, greater product support, and total cost of ownership across the product’s lifecycle. In other words, the construction equipment market is becoming more competitive.
In order to meet customer requirements, we are making our products and services more performance oriented, and we will adapt them as per application requirements, both for the short -and long-term needs of the users. We are investing in advanced technologies and processes, undertaking intensive R&D to come up with products that will bring greater safety and efficiency, and adapting our products to the new emission regulations. Our power train facility is fully equipped to meet all these requirements in India. Volvo Truck’s core philosophy is to make safer and more efficient products for which we have the engineering expertise. We also engage with our customers to take their feedback. Our partnership with Eicher Motor will bring in the synergy of the two companies to develop premium products which will deliver higher fuel efficiency and higher productivity. Our aim is to deliver total cost of operations to our customers in India.
What improvisations are you making in the products?
We will undertake greater digitization of our products to enable our customers to gather important data on the performance of our trucks, fuel consumption, operator behavior, etc., which can then be evaluated. We will also strengthen our customer support, maintenance and parts supply. In fact, our customer support center in Bangalore and others across India are proactively addressing customer needs, including pre -and post operations, so that they get higher uptime of their trucks.
Digitization will also enable our trucks to work in both closed and open circuits, and by connecting them to other equipment, the owners and operators can derive the right cycle times even more accurately. However, it may not be completely possible to make the technology absolute in its entity. But considering the factors, we will make the operational data more comprehensive so that our customers can get faster cycle times and assured product availability.
NBM&CW March 2020
