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Schwing Stetter India launched their ‘Technovation 2022’ fest at their Global Manufacturing Hub in Cheyyar, Tamil Nadu, from February 7-13. The idea was to bring together diverse industrial customers, stakeholders, local and global technology leaders to syndicate conversations about technology, partnerships, and innovation that can help advance market technology adoption. The objective of the tech fest is to exhibit the concept of innovation through technology in the concrete and construction industries across the country.
VG Sakthikumar, MD, Schwing Stetter India, said, “For long, the concept of innovation & technology has fascinated us and we know that those are the driving factors behind infrastructure growth. We believe that this would be a perfect interactive platform to broaden product range and technology enabled service offerings. It also empowers and helps us to understand our customers in a better manner.”
The event featured 70+ technology-driven products on display for the construction process.
The state-of-the-art integrated facility of 52 acres comprising 50,000m2 of built-up area will now become a global manufacturing hub for Schwing’s concrete boom pumps, stationary pumps, self-loading mixers, shotcrete pumps, excavators, wheel loaders and motor graders. Schwing Stetter signed an agreement with the Tamil Nadu government through the Global Investors Meet in 2019 and has already invested Rs 300 crore in this facility.
Schwing Stetter has four factories located in Sriperumbadur, Tamil Nadu. The new facility, built to be sustainable with a natural green cover, focuses on ensuring digitalization of all equipment’s and production process with an extensive usage of telematics, IoT and robotic machine learning. The new facility will also include a NABL Certified Quality Testing Lab and a custom bonded warehouse facility.
What led to this Technovation this year began early last year when Schwing Stetter India saw its order book doubled as compared with a year ago. It was hopeful of repeating the success in 2021 and 2022. Though covid-19 impacted the businesses across segments in 2020, it it turned out to be a good year for the company.
“Overall, we saw a decline of 9% in 2020, as compared to 2019, which was not a good year due to Lok Sabha elections. However, the situation looked better from the second half of 2019 as the Centre pumped in money into infra activities to reboot the economy. Though we lost nearly three months of production due to covid-19 in 2020, we were able to make out 91% of previous year’s business in the calendar year,” says Sakthi Kumar.
While domestic business continues to grow, Schwing Stetter witnessed a boom in equipment exports too. In 2020, the company’s exports were worth Rs 70 crore. This year, it will more than double its exports at about Rs 200 crore.
The overall volume in the construction equipment (CE) industry is expected to cross one lakh units in 2021, he added. Road construction has been a major volume driver for the CE industry with pace of execution pace remaining healthy at 37 km per day in FY2021.
It goes without saying that demand revival for the construction equipment sector has seen a rise across equipment and most of these have been driven by the spurt in activities in roads and highways building, metro rail network and high-speed train projects.
The company expects to end this calendar year with double-digit growth in revenue. In pandemic-hit 2020, the company reported total revenue of about Rs 1,730 crore. They saw an exponential increase in order book size and the brief lockdown phase this time saw more growth in sales, and almost touched last year’s revenue in September.
The right moves
At the back-end, Schwing Stetter India has been putting several processes in motion so as to make the overall experience better for customers. Last month, it signed two MoUs with Gulf Oil and HPCL to launch a range of oils for construction equipment. The partnership aims to bring a range of products that include hydraulic oil, engine oil, axle oil, gear oil and high-end synthetic gear oil for their concrete pump, batching plant, concrete mixture and self-loading mixer and the entire range of construction equipment.
In December, it signed an MoU with Federal Bank to offer customised financial solutions to customers. The bank will work towards catering to the customers’ needs through commercial equipment loans with easy monthly repayment plans best suited for the customers. Moreover, the bank will leverage technology for enhancing customer experience.
The company, which is a “Centre of Excellence” for training in concreting products is a partner to the IESC Skill Council and will be housing a modernised training centre at its new facility, which will provide skilling to youth across nearby districts.
Sakthikumar said, “This new facility is the beginning of our journey towards Industry 4.0. The smart facility has taken all initiatives to be a sustainable manufacturing unit. The newly inaugurated facility will export to International markets across Africa to ASEAN and cater to the internal needs of Schwing’s subsidiaries across the Globe. Having entered the export market of Bauma, Munich and Eastern Europe, from this global manufacturing hub, we expect to enter Brazil, USA and GCC market.
Complete News Source : Construction Week
