Car-O-Liner India Pvt. Ltd., the Indian arm of the Swedish collision repair, wheel alignment and frame straightening solutions provider, is looking to double its sales to 1,600 units in the next five to six years. The Gothenburg-based firm, which operates under the ‘Car-O-Liner’, ‘Josam’, and ‘TruckCam’ brands, will also be setting up an academy training centre for commercial vehicles by 2020. The company primarily caters to automotive and commercial body shops and OEMs.
Mr. Per Jørgensen, Managing Director, Car-O-Liner India Pvt. Ltd., stated: “We are striving to be the global leader in workshop and industrial solutions with high-quality, technologically-advanced collision repair solutions to the automotive and commercial industry as well as wheel alignment for the aftermarket and complete factory solutions. For more than forty years, we have supplied the global auto industry with innovative solutions, technical development, training and customer support. Over 60,000 Car-O-Liner, Josam and TruckCam systems are in use worldwide. In India, we have supplied over 800 units (700 COL, 100 Josam & Truckam) since we sold the first unit in 1998. Not only will we double that count, we will grow our turnover twofold from 2015 to 2020.”
It is to be mentioned that under the ‘Car-o-Liner’ umbrella brand, the namesake brand is into Automotive Crash Repair Systems, (Measuring Data and Crash Repair Benches) and has five distributors at different locations in the country. For Josam, which is into wheel alignment and frame straightening, it has two distributors – one being Tribotech for wheel alignment (pan-India) based in Mumbai and ‘Madhus’ (pan-India) for frame straightening based in Bangalore. For ‘Truck Cam’, it has only one distributor – MAHA (pan-India) mainly for factory solutions for wheel and axle alignment as well as wheel alignment systems for the aftermarket.
When quizzed about the driving factors for its twofold growth, Mr. Jørgensen affirmed, “India will account for a 15% market share of all the total trucks sold in the world by 2020. Furthermore, a majority of vehicle makers’ manufacturing facilities here are state-of-the-art and our products are well accepted by them. India is one of the countries in APAC where wheel alignment is quite rampant due to poor roads and the way the trucks are manufactured here. There is a latent demand in the domestic aftermarket.”
However, he also acknowledged that the influx of next-generation trucks is altering the market dynamics thus opening up vistas for garage equipment players. At present, Car-o-Liner India has got its equipment installed at the premises of Ashok Leyland, Mahindra Trucks and Buses, Tata Motors, Daimler, Scania, Volvo, VECV, MAN, Michelin, Bridgestone. In fact, all mobile vans used by Michelin are equipped with Josam.
Apart from expanding its network, it is also looking to cater to LCV segment with its upcoming product lines and hoping to generate 50% of its business (30% currently) from the CV segment by 2020.
“We have lined up products for the HCV and LCV segments which are developed keeping Indian conditions in mind It is something on the lines of ‘Floor anchoring reinstallation’ that has been installed in Malaysia, Japan, Thailand, etc. We have to do some knowledge sharing to see some opportunities for the workshops,” concluded Mr. Jørgensen.