An 850-million Euro German Concrete machinery manufacturer, SCHWING Stetter serves to infrastructure developers and is a niche provider of OEM supplier to various cement companies who offer Ready Mix Concrete.
Anand Sundaresan, Vice-Chairman & Managing Director, SCHWING Stetter says that the construction equipment industry is currently in a depressed state but sentiments seem to be positive and everyone waits for the market to pick-up.
- Give us an overview of construction equipment industry?
The construction equipment industry is currently in a depressed state. The last 3 years of downturn, has put this industry in deep trouble. Every manufacturer is facing huge input cost increase, interest cost increase and huge reduction in off take leading to substantial reduction in capacity utilisation.
The off take in certain areas for the past few months has increased. However, manufacturers are not able to execute these orders as the buyers (construction companies) are facing difficulty in raising funds for purchasing the equipment. So overall the situation has not improved.
Having said that, the sentiments seem to be positive and we are all waiting for the market to pick-up.
With respect to capacity, I feel, most of the manufacturers have un-utilized capacity which will easily see them through for an increase of 30-50%.
- Do you foresee positive growth in the upcoming year? What are the major growth drivers going to be?
We know it is a fact that the bureaucrats and the ministers are working over-time to bring policy reforms and finding funds for kick starting the stalled infrastructure projects. We hope that all these things should be in place in the next 3-6 months time. Therefore the coming years should be better than what it was in last two years. For equipment manufacturers like us, infrastructure projects like road projects, smart cities, dedicated freight corridors, etc would be growth drivers.
- The Indian construction & mining equipment industry is going through major technological reforms as demand for specialized and high-capacity equipment is on the rise. Comment.
It is true that many new projects would demand specialized and higher capacity equipments. For eg, if you take the building segment in metro cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai etc., many high-rise building projects are coming up. Use of high strength concrete for these tall structures are being more and more envisaged. These call for, specialized equipment for concrete production transportation and pumping.
We at SSI are already working on many such projects and are fully equipped to supply equipments for such type of projects. Use of tower crane for such projects is unavoidable. Therefore the demand of Tower Crane is also on the rise. This is one of the reasons that we have also launched tower crane during the recently held bc India exhibition at Greater Noida in Delhi.
Similarly the current Government has ambitious plans to substantially increase the speed of construction of National Highways. It is also understood that many of these roads would be concrete roads. This will substantially increase the demand for higher capacity Batching Plants, concrete pavers, road making machines, etc…
As our Prime Minister has mentioned speed, scale and skill will be required for substantially improving the economy of our country. These can be achieved only with state of the art, high technology and higher capacity equipment’s.
- Schwing Stetter unveiled five new products last year. How has the market’s acceptance of those products been so far? Any new product launches planned in near future?
The products that we have launched last year were very well accepted by the Market. Some of the products are already doing extremely well and we hope with the new infrastructure projects coming up all these products would be much sought after.
We have been regularly introducing new products. Recently we launched our Tower Crane at bc India fair in Greater Noida and we also did a soft launch of our Self Loading Mixer during the Builders Association convention held in Chennai on 9th Jan 2015. We will keep introducing newer products appropriately.
- SCHWING Stetter has set up the F-75 Fabrication Unit in Chennai. Tell us more about it?
The fabrication unit was set up in the beginning of 2013 and now it is functioning in full strength. This unit is basically for fabrication of high strength steel components for our concrete Boom Pumps and Separate Placing Booms. We believe that the Boom Pump market will increase substantially in the future, provided we are able to bring down the cost of these products.
The only way to achieve this is local production. Our fabrication unit is certified by a welding institute from Deusburg and our welders, engineers are qualified and certified for carrying out welding on fine grain steel.
