The truck-mounted applications segment comprising tippers, garbage compactors, truck-mounted cranes, skip loaders, car carriers, fire engines, etc., has become a lot more advanced and sophisticated in India over the last few years. The domestic market has witnessed the entry of multinationals to provide both the end-solutions to customers and the systems and components required for developing such solutions.
Alpha Drives is a home-grown company which has emerged a front-runner in the PTO segment, delivering products at quality levels on par with global standards. The company has slowly and steadily become one of the largest players in the segment and continues to enhance its presence with new innovative products to meet growing customer demands.
We had an exclusive interaction with Mr. Suresh J. Williams, Managing Director, Alpha Drives, to know more about the company’s progress, its strengths and plans for the future.
Excerpts:
To begin with, please give us a background about your company and your presence in the Indian market.
Alpha Drives, a little over 25 years old, has specialized in the design and manufacture of PTOs for trucks over the past 10 years. We are a family-owned professionally-run company with a very strong background in the manufacture of gears, as well as in the design and development of gearboxes. Our PTOs are fitted as OE fitment by many truck OEMs and most truck hydraulic OEMs in India.
What about your product portfolio and what are the products and solutions you offer in the Indian market?
At the moment, we have the largest range of PTOs for India-made trucks. We have PTOs for ZF, Eaton, Nissan, Mahindra, Daimler and most gearboxes of Tata Motors. In fact, we are world leaders in PTOs for Tata trucks. Our R&D team works closely with the applications and design team of OEMs to come up with PTOs which are integrated with the transmissions.
Our mission is to facilitate truck builders and special vehicle builders and help extend and diversify the applications for which their trucks can be used. We work closely with the application builders to better understand their needs to integrate truck hydraulics and other systems into the truck, so that we can give them an optimal solution.
Who are your major customers in the Indian market? How do you plan to expand your clientele?
As a 100 per cent Indian company, we take pride in the fact that we have taken on and beaten multinational competition in designing and developing PTOs for the latest trucks in India. In fact, we are the only company to have developed and proved PTOs for the Tata Ultra trucks that have been recently launched, with G550 gearboxes.
While we work very closely with CV OEMs including Tata Motors, Mahindra, AMW, Ashok Leyland and Nissan Leyland in the design and development stage, our major sales are to the truck hydraulic system Integrators such as Wipro, Hyva, TAL, Dantal and IPH.
To improve our resilience to the cyclical nature of the truck industry, we have started working on auxiliary gearboxes for farm machinery. We see the farm machinery segment as being counter-cyclical to the truck industry.
We have also created a Strategic Products Division (SPD) as an SBU with a focus on PTOs and auxiliary gearboxes for defence equipment. We are working with BEML and HVF for the past few years. We have also started working with Mahindra Defence Land Systems on a couple of projects. These are projects with long gestation periods, but we are in business for the long run, so we are comfortable with it.
How many manufacturing facilities do you have and what is the production capacity at the facilities?
We have our R&D center and our PTO manufacturing division at Kanuvai in Coimbatore. Our R&D division is manned by a team of young enthusiastic engineers with the latest technology, headed by a very well experienced Head of R&D. The centre is equipped with a number of endurance and cyclical test rigs. We are further working with an expert from IIT to develop a closed-loop power regenerating test rig to meet our needs for research in the load vs. life of PTOs.
Our PTO Division is a modern purpose-built CNC facility with an ergonomically designed assembly area. We are supported by a set of casting and forging suppliers which help us maintain very high quality levels. The reliability of our PTOs is an industry benchmark, an area in which we are constantly trying to better ourselves.
As a big portion of our customers are in the Mumbai – Pune region, we plan to set up an assembly unit there. It should have happened last year, but has been delayed because of the market slowdown over the past two years.
We have also acquired a one-acre plot of industrial land in Coimbatore which should help us to scale up operations over the next few years.
What are the USPs of your products to make them superior to those of competitors?
Our products are designed for Indian trucks for Indian conditions and for Indian usage. This means that our PTO housings are of special-grade material and have special heat treatment as required. Our gears are optimally designed to take peak overloads. We also take care to design for the harsh manner in which our PTOs could be used. We test our PTOs on specially-built endurance test rigs and cyclical test rigs at our R&D center to validate our designs.
What gives us an edge over the competition is our readiness to adapt our products specifically to the needs of our OEM customers.
How do you work on developing new products for the market? Could you share details on your focus on R&D and technological advancements?
Product development at Alpha Drives is driven by customer demand. We are continuously challenged by our customers to come up with improved designs at lower costs, or to come up with a new model of PTO, so that their truck can be put to new and more demanding uses.
Our focus is on developing our own technology. This is why we invest heavily in R&D. We also work closely with Webster Drives of the UK in the area of drivelines. We also work with them on PTOs for Allison transmissions. Webster Drives is one of only three companies in the world whose PTOs are approved for fitment on Allison transmissions. They are one of the first in the world to come up with clutch PTOs ensuring energy conservation in applications such as garbage compactors as well as in fan drives and AC drives for latest generation buses.
We understand that you currently have two dealers in India. How do you handle the sales and service operations in two different parts of the country?
As our focus has been on serving the OE market, we have not worked on extending our dealer network. We do have dealers, mainly in the Mumbai – Pune region as well as in the Salem area. However, this year we would like to add at least one dealer in each metro city so that spares and servicing support for our customers across India is handled from these points.
What are your views on the prolonged slowdown in the market? How do you see the Indian component/system supplier industry develop in the coming years?
The Indian market is driven by domestic demand and therefore quite stable. It is unfortunate that over the last couple of years, we have been faced with a slump. This is the third such recession that I have faced in my business career, and the longest. Having learnt some lessons from the past, the impact of the last slowdown has not been too severe on our company. In fact, our company with the help of our very progressive bankers and other business partners is emerging stronger from the slowdown.
Your turnover figures for FY14? What are your targets for the current year? How much of an impact do you think the new Government at the Centre would have on the industry?
I would like to forget what happened in the last two years. Going forward, we will make a turnover of over Rs. 10 crores in the current financial year (FY15). We have new products in the pipeline which will help us grow aggressively over the next five years. I feel that the new Government must take up ambitious infrastructure projects and give new impetus to the manufacturing sector.
Our nation’s focus on developing indigenous technology needs to be sharpened as well as supported. We feel good that as an SME our country has given us the opportunity to develop products for our industry which are second to none in the world, even against multinational competition. I feel that we have very good engineering strengths, which should be supported to leverage our technological position in the world.
Finally, what could we expect from Alpha Drives in the next couple of years? Do you have any interesting news related to your medium- to long-term plans?
We have some very good Driveline products in the pipeline. This will help us grow faster over the next few years. We want to leverage our position as the world leader in PTOs for Tata trucks, by entering geographies such as South Africa, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh where Tata Motors has strong presence. We also have a revolutionary product for the truck hydraulics segment which is currently under wraps. I should be able to share more news about it in about three months’ time.