Escorts Construction Equipment manufactures and markets a diverse range of construction and material handling equipment like cranes, loaders, vibratory rollers and forklifts. Rajinder Raina comments on the growth opportunity for road-building equipment sector and also gives useful tips to customers to determine their focus.
Grab the opportunityAs per the recent announcement by Government, Road Ministry targets building 25-km of roads per day. Escorts looks at this opportunity being very optimistic. The company believes that it has the capability to deliver this output and the construction equipment industry is ready for it.
Growth in the roads sector“Roads will be the sector that will be one of the first ones to witness growth,” believes Mr Raina. “The industry volumes not being too high the growth over the last year could exceed 20 per cent. Given the plans and the priority for the coming years, this growth shall sustain itself on a long term basis.”
He adds, “Work would also pick up on repairs and rework on existing roads as well. This will throw up demand for other types of road construction equipment as well. “
Many kinds of road-building equipment are going to drive the growth. This road-building equipment range comprises various sizes of dozers, motor graders and compaction equipment like vibratory soil compactors, asphalt pavers for laying asphalt, tandem vibratory rollers for compaction of asphalt, mini tandem rollers for compaction of shoulders and edges of approach roads to flyovers. For surface finishing of asphalt roads, the pneumatic tyre rollers are used.
Industry-friendly procurement guidelinesRoad construction equipment follows well defined and primarily minimalistic guidelines and the manufacturers are offering equipment that conforms to the technical specifications and deliverables there from. The guidelines follow a defined protocol which is standard and pretty well defined and inclusive for all the players in the industry. Thus the procurement guidelines for PPP projects could be considered as pretty industry-friendly.
Customer’s lookoutWhen it comes to road construction equipment, a customer should look majorly for four things. Mr Raina describes the same as follows:• The technical specifications as laid down in the ‘Orange book’. These are the minimum basic or qualifying specifications• The deliverables that give the end result like the desired compaction• Performance characteristics like productivity and the cost thereof. This includes fuel efficiency• Reliability and up time (after sales support). Any downtime of the equipment results in direct and collateral loss of the interlinked equipment, e.g. in case of tandem rollers the trucks carrying the hot mix, the delay is over and above these losses.
It’s very important to evaluate the above aspects rather than be driven by the price tag. —————————————————————–Roads will be the sector that will be one of the first ones to witness growth.
– Rajinder Raina, General Manager – Marketing, Escorts Construction Equipment