Wirtgen India: Enabling Sustainable Construction
What innovations and new solutions is Wirtgen offering to make customers more productive and more efficient?
Wirtgen’s production systems are designed to meet all the required applications in road construction. The end-users benefit not only from the efficient interaction of construction equipment and technical solutions from the Wirtgen Group, but also from the synergies generated in the alliance with John Deere, which will be available to our customers from March 2023.
The ecological and economic potential of such teamwork is enormous, as it ranges from cold recycling and asphalt recycling to zero-emission applications in urban areas and other sensitive locations, to large-scale rehabilitation measures and even small communal projects.
The Wirtgen Group and John Deere are working on various smart and sustainable technologies, including electric machines from our HAMM and VOGELE brands. Going forward, we shall see more products coming with alternate fuels.
The Group is working on sustainable construction through its recycling business portfolio where work is done for soil stabilization of rural roads, recycling of asphalt roads, recycling of bio waste, saving of aggregates by recycling, blast-free mining using our surface miners, and so on.
We offer a complete set of service packages to our customers including AMCs and Full Maintenance Contracts. We also offer training programs for operators and other technical service teams through our operator schools which are available both in-house and onsite.
How can the CE fraternity and the Government make the project bidding process more stringent?
We need to look at areas like the pre-qualification norms which should be more stringent for bidders; we need to give more weightage to the technical competence and financial stability of the bidders. Also, strict quality monitoring has to be undertaken by the agencies that are awarding the jobs. This will ensure that we get world-class infrastructure.
The CE Industry reached its peak in 2018, after which, businesses started to decline. The current volumes are down by 20 - 40% depending on the equipment type and category. This is because the actual construction of roads per km dropped drastically and also most of the projects did not start with bidders taking jobs at a minus 20-30% below the estimated costs.
The CE industry is well equipped to meet any increase in equipment demand. We are operating at way below our installed capacities. And companies like ours have more focus on exports.
Rental companies are feeling the heat with some OEMs entering the rental business; how do you look at this concern of the rental companies?
We are not very active in the rental segment as we do not want to compete with our rental customers. However in certain niche areas, we do offer machines in a way- which does not compete with our rental customers.
NBM&CW JANUARY 2023
