JTAC, a brand of Trans ACNR Solutions Pvt. Ltd., has emerged as the clear market leader in the highly-competitive Indian bus AC market. The company made its presence felt at Busworld, putting up a stellar presentation at the show. JTAC has grown in leaps and bounds over the last few years thanks to its wide product range catering to all types of bus applications and its unrelenting focus on aftersales support which has proved to be a game-changer in the field.
We spoke to Mr. Shatrughan Kumar, Managing Director, Trans ACNR Solutions Pvt. Ltd., to get insights.
Excerpts:
How is business at JTAC? How is the market and present and what kind of sales numbers are your looking at for the current year?
We are very happy with the way business is doing at present. Within the first six months of this financial year (FY), we have already reached the total sales figures of last FY. We sold around 3,200 bus AC units last FY and are on track to comfortably surpassing it and crossing 6,000 units by the end of this FY, significantly increasing our market share to around 40 per cent in the process. Our versatile product range has helped us perform very well in states with high TIV of buses including Maharashtra, Karnataka, and Madhya Pradesh.
We understand you have launched a new mobile App for aftersales service support. Could you detail us on the application?
Yes, we have recently added a service application to strengthen our aftersales support. We get a lot of real-time data such as service status, complete log details, etc., when a service request is raised. The app helps us track our service engineers’ movement and enables us reach the customer quickly. We also have a video conferencing option through the app to help our engineers get real-time assistance if required. The app can be accessed by the customer, his service manager and technicians who will have different level of controls, and will be multi-lingual in use, being used over Android, iOS, as well as desktop monitored. The customer can also send an enquiry in case he wants to purchase new units.
An important factor for JTAC’s market success has been your sales & aftersales support network. How are you growing on this front?
We have been consistently expanding our network and currently have touch points in 19 cities across India, seven locations of which have full-fledged workshops. The average size of our workshops is 20,000 sq. m. with a workforce of nearly 25 people, enabling us to handle 6 to 7 buses simultaneously. We also have resident service engineers in some Tier-II & Tier-III locations such as Patna, Jamshedpur, Ranchi, etc., and all of them are equipped with necessary spare parts and respond to service calls instantly. While we are in the process of setting up a workshop in Mumbai, in South India we already have touch points in Hyderabad, Vijayawada, Bangalore, Cochin, Karur and Chennai. In the North, apart from the NCR region, we have very strong presence in Chandigarh, Jaipur and Lucknow. All our touch points come with fully equipped service vans, ensuring round the clock support, with proactive ownership of our products by our service and maintenance team.
How do you test and validate products?
We have a well-experienced team of engineers for testing and validating our products, including some with over 25 years of experience in the field. We do not bring a product from the international market which is essentially designed for countries having fair weather temperature conditions; our units are designed, tested and validated at our psychometric laboratory, under adverse simulated conditions of high heat and humidity. The fact that all major fleet owners and bus body manufacturers are ambassadors of our product quality validates the suitability of our products specific to the demanding conditions of our country. We also have a wide product range, so much so, that we have a specific product suitable for every meter difference in length of the bus. We have seen many cases where the right product is not being used by the customer, hence we advocate an optimized and tailor made product, best suited for the specific application.
What are the new developments on the technology side?
We have showcased our inverter based electric AC unit, having COP (co-efficient of performance), here at Busworld and have received good number of enquiries for the same. We will be selling them based on the government’s push for electric buses, and have already bagged a sizeable order from a leading bus body builder in India. 24V DC battery driven cabin air-conditioning units, currently being imported by us from South Korea is also on the anvil in being manufactured by us.
Micro-channel heat exchangers (MCHX) based AC units is a technology that we provide our customers as an option. We are also working on modular designs which will help bring down the development cost and eventually reflecting better product pricing.
Have you bagged any orders from STUs and OEMs recently?
On the STU side, we have a rate contract with ASRTU for supply of ACs to all States. We have recently supplied 50 units to SETC in Tamil Nadu, 350 units to UPSRTC, to PSRTC, CTU, PUNBUS and are in touch with a number of other leading STUs. In terms of OEM business, we currently supply to the requirements of Ashok Leyland, through their designated bus body manufacturers and also for export requirements to Middle East, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Swaraj Mazda and Force Motors continue to prefer our air-conditioning units owing to our sustained commitment to the Indian bus market, and preference of our brand by end customers. Tata Motors, Mahindra and Volvo Eicher have also taken notice through the voice of our customers, and we have been engaging well with them. The requirements of process and systems certification, TS 16949 has been completed and our company is being certified such, adding further impetus to our OEM business.
How are you doing on exports?
We are already been exporting our units to Lanka Ashok Leyland and will be clocking 500 units this FY, covering Russia, Nepal, GCC, Bangladesh and Egypt. We have set up an office in Dubai and plan to open a warehouse and service setup in Middle East in the near future, from where we plan to serve markets like Qatar, Oman, Saudi and also Africa. Our manufactured-in-India products now handsomely compete with China in the international market, for bagging export orders, a vision we have well realized and further strengthening on.
This Busworld became more special for us thanks to the visit of a delegation from Emirates Transport Services from Dubai including Mr. Saud Al Ali, Workshop Director, and Mr. Subhash Pillai, General Manager – Project, to get a first-hand experience of our presentation and in getting to know the latest trends in the bus AC market of our country.