New Swan sets sight on trailer segment

Focus on offering complete trailer parts kit

Here’s a company that focuses 100 per cent on the OEM segment in the domestic market – New Swan Autocomp Pvt. Ltd. Headquartered at Ludhiana in Punjab, the component maker has eight plants located across the North and the West. Established in 1985, it caters to different vehicle segments, including two-wheelers, passenger cars, commercial vehicles, trailers and farm vehicles.

Mr. Sanjay Sharma, DGM – Marketing, New Swan Autocomp

The company has been supplying to one of the big three trailer manufacturers in Europe and made its debut at the IAA Commercial Vehicles fair held in Hannover last September to explore business opportunities.

Mr. Sanjay Sharma, DGM – Marketing, New Swan Autocomp Pvt. Ltd., shared: “Trailer parts is one of our key focus areas at present and IAA is the best platform to showcase our capabilities in this space. We export suspension parts and accessories to a leading trailer OEM in Europe and also to the aftermarket in the region, which together contribute around 10 per cent to our total turnover. We started offering trailer parts and accessories around a year and a half and would like to add some more components to be able to offer a complete kit for customers. We find very good potential in the European trailer market and want to expand our horizon by adding more customers in this space.”

New Swan’s India biz is also growing steadily, driven by the overall rise in vehicle sales. While close to 60 per cent of its revenue coming from the two-wheeler segment, passenger cars and CVs account for around 10 per cent each, with the rest coming from agricultural vehicles.

An OE-centric brand in the domestic arena, New Swan does not sell its products in the aftermarket in India since its parts are built-to-print for the OEs. The company does not plan to enter the replacement market in the near future either.

With its sharp focus on its recently-introduced range of trailer parts, New Swan hopes to penetrate the domestic trailer OE market soon. “We are yet to reach out to trailer manufacturers in the Indian market. We entered the agricultural vehicle market in 2010 and have since established our footprint in the space quite well. We would like to approach the trailer segment in a similar way”, revealed Mr. Sharma.

Asked as to what it takes to be ready for future challenges that lie ahead in the Indian market, especially the BS-VI transition, he replied: “It depends on what the customer needs. We are adaptive to new technologies. We don’t see much of a difficulty in coping with the market changes; when the market moved from BS-III to BS-IV we made changes in our products, and now we are ready with products for BS-VI as well.”