Volvo Trucks showcased its might at Excon 2k21 with flagship products. Prateek Pardeshi caught up with the team to understand the significance.
Volvo Trucks India (Volvo Trucks) brought in its flagship products at the Excon 2k21. Launched in September 2021, the company showcased the Volvo FMX 500 8×4 off-road dump truck and the Volvo FM 420 8×4 23 Cu.m construction tipper as complete transport solutions. Given its expertise in coal overburden removal projects as well as iron ore, bauxite, and manganese among other mining applications, the company with the Volvo FMX 500 drew attention to the 15 per cent higher load-carrying capacity aimed at boosting mining productivity even further (Refer to January 2022, Cover story for in-depth product details). With the FM 420, Volvo Trucks is looking to redefine offerings for road construction, irrigation, and quarry operations. Averred B. Dinakar, Executive Vice President, Volvo Trucks India, VE Commercial Vehicles, “Volvo Trucks continues to further its promise to keep driving progress through excellent products and innovative solutions. Backed by world-class service, Volvo Trucks India now has a wider range of transport solutions to cater to the unique and demanding requirements of various applications in India as both mining and construction segments pick-up momentum.”
At Excon 2k21, Volvo Trucks introduced the ‘Fuel Efficiency’ service that facilitates driver skill enhancement using next-generation, advanced analytics. Through the ‘Fleet Assist’ service, the company offers advanced features like combining trip information with truck route prediction using constant learning algorithms that aid in reducing fleet idle time thereby increasing utilisation. Through ‘Uptime Care’, operators can monitor their fleet uptime including vehicle-wise repair status, and overall fleet utilisation to name a few features. Fully integrated with ‘Volvo Connect’, Volvo Truck’s telematics solution provides customers with the most up-to-date, relevant information in real-time in a bid to offer optimised operational efficiency, uptime, and productivity aid.”
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Enhancing Customer Productivity
In an exclusive Industry Talk session, B. Dinakar, Executive Vice President, Volvo Trucks India and Jonas Nilsson, Vice President, India and Indonesia spoke to Prateek Pardeshi on the Excon 2k21 lineup aimed at enhancing customer productivity.
Q. How have the launches from 2021 translated into business?
Dinakar: The new models launched in September 2021 have been well received by customers, broadly. The customers have welcomed the trucks with the higher capacity and improved productivity by 15 per cent compared to the previous generations. Our sales have increased and we’ve been able to meet customer requirements both in terms of productivity enhancement and operational efficiency enhancement.
Q. What do you mean by driving customer progress?
Jonas: It’s a wide array of things. It’s something we have associated with the brand for over decades of our presence in the country. We are always striving for bringing innovations. Progress encompasses productivity. As a premium brand our trucks are regarded as relatively expensive, but we strive to make a case for customers by driving productivity and thereby progress.
Q. How are you progressing on the upcoming norms??
Jonas: It’s already available on our trucks. So it’s more like legislation is catching up with us. We are ready for OBD two, for example.
Q. Have the recent supply chain bottlenecks hampered operations and product rollouts?
Jonas: The semiconductor crisis has affected everyone for sure but we have been relatively successful in prioritising customer deliveries and getting trucks delivered to the market. The adaptive cruise control is something that is easily available from us and it’s something that we will evaluate to introduce for the Indian market in the future.
Q. What is the market share of Volvo trucks in the premium segment?
Dinakar: Our market share is about 75 per cent in the premium high-end trucks segment. We are now growing into new segments like road construction, and also the long haul for the express cargo, where we see a logistics customer requirement.
Q. Have the customers demanded solutions like the Volvo FH series?
Jonas: We’re looking at the lineup we have in our factory today. It doesn’t have the FH but we always have the option to bring the FH into India as well. But we believe the FM series cater to most of the requirements. we can deliver if someone is interested to have the top of a line product. But our offerings meet most expectations already today. Any requirements for Globetrotter assets are yet to be signalled here. We have all the lineup of vehicles with us, however, we don’t want to introduce variants just for the sake of introducing them. We would like to offer the best value proposition as we sell on it. That value proposition is then delivered as a transport solution. Just to give you an example, a customer with a tractor-trailer earlier had only rigid trucks. From doing a run of up to 12,000 kms today he is able to clock 25,000 kms, which is a testimony to Volvo Trucks driving progress. We will introduce new solutions when the time is right!
