Thermo King, a brand of Ingersoll Rand, leads the world in manufacturing and innovating transport temperature control systems for a variety of mobile applications, including trailers, truck bodies, buses, shipboard containers and rail cars. Mr. Sudarshan S. Ananth, Territory Vice President and Business Head – HVAC & Transport, India Climate Business Unit, Ingersoll Rand, Bangalore, provides his domain insights.
Excerpts:
Kindly outline Thermo King’s manufacturing and business operations in India.
Thermo King as brand has been present in India since over 2 decades serving 100’s of customer in Reefer truck and HVAC bus segments. We serve our customer with dedicated sales resources working closely with wide range of sales and service dealers who are trained to deliver best in class service to Thermo King customers. Most of our dealers have been with us since inception and command the position of “a trusted support” to our customers. We have been able to address the expanding refrigeration truck reach of our customers with “service along the route concept” with a dedicated back office application engineering team and 24*7 customer call center support team at Bangalore.
Being a global corporation, we leverage scale and productivity of our manufacturing across several manufacturing setup spread over many countries. The advantage in this approach is we get consistently reliable and world class products at optimum pricing for our customers. Our India footprint is many decades old with our Naroda facility which makes products for Ingersoll Rand Air compressors as well was making a few Thermo King products. We started a small assembly operation Chennai in 2013 to assemble some of Truck reefer and Bus air-conditioners products. What we make here is small range compared to our overall portfolio of products in Thermo King and supplement it with imports rest from our global footprint for our Indian Customers.
Please share details on your product offering and their USPs.
Thermo King offers both vehicle powered, self-powered and electric powered products which are designed to cater to every need of Indian customers
• Vehicle powered products (also called as VP Series) have special features making it compatible with low engine power vehicles, No vehicle modification required with minimum maintenance cost.
• Self-powered products, (popularly called as T Series), consume low fuel than competing products, helps reduce emissions & waste, have lower life cycle cost, reliable at various duty conditions and easy to maintain. The range is with versatile capacity that caters to customer requirement.
• Marine, trailer and rail refrigeration solutions under SLX and precedent series is one of the unique products in the Industry and is a benchmark product in its category. It optimum cooling at lower cost of ownership with superior reliability factors like uptime, fine temperature control and remote diagnostics.
• Cold Cube containers, are self-contained electric powered , are specifically designed for transport refrigeration will be available in 6 different options and capacity ranging 140L, 330L, & 915L. This unique product will give flexibility to customers to use it in multiple vehicles. Unique value proposition of these products are that there is no need to modify the vehicle body to accommodate these units.. This solution will also bring revolution to last mile distribution and in coming days will be one of the popular which support to various needs of customer
Our long standing value of reliability, higher performance and best in class efficiency makes these products a first choice of preference with users and customer.
How has the reefer market grown over the last few years?
Reefer market is constantly growing and has evolved over past years aligned to changing demographic, socio economic and urbanisation pattern in India. We have seen increase in infrastructure for cold chain industry. Various Government schemes support setting up of cold storages and distribution centers promote usage of refrigerated transportation. Growth seen in 1st mile pick up of fresh perishable produce and last mile distribution of fresh and processed foods is key growth driver in this segment. India is still to see evolved cold chain logistics distribution system of developed market owing largely to road infrastructure and its associated cost but we are seeing signs of that happening over next decade.
Thermo King’s refrigeration systems with single and multi-temperature capability ensure reliable performance while delivering industry leading fuel efficiency for transporters. Thermo King offers range of products which supports the cold chain market, very soon our innovative and unique product – cold cube will be launched in India.
We are privileged to hold a preferred supplier position with our customers in India market and our status in India is aligned with our global vision to be a vendor of choice for our users and end customers. Our innovation and our product performance gives us an edge.
What is the role of the chassis sub-systems in supporting the refrigeration unit operations?
Not really. Truck/chassis sub-systems don’t play a role in supporting the refrigeration unit operations. Currently, controls provided by OEM are more for vehicle operation and not designed for refrigeration. Hence, there is opportunity to synchronize between controls and telematics but it is still in evolving stage. Thermo King is working closely with logistics operator to deliver on Telematics.