Today, an increasing number of customers prefer a 0-km run vehicle over ones which are driven all the way from the vehicle’s manufacturing location to the delivery site. There is rising demand for the best-in-class transportation of vehicles, be it cars or commercial vehicles, which has undoubtedly created a huge potential for quality car and CV carriers in the Indian market.
With a number of potential opportunities opening up in the CV carrier segment, Mr. Kapil Hissaria, Director, Tippers and Trailers India Pvt. Ltd., is confident that the growing demand would prove to be a shot in the arm for his company.
Established by the Hissaria Group in 2004 at Bangalore, Tippers and Trailers India Pvt. Ltd. started in a modest way in terms of production facilities, beginning with car carrier trailers, tip trailers and tippers for the highway track. Today the company is renowned as one of the leaders in the Indian car carrier segment. With its main manufacturing plant in Bangalore, the company set up its second facility in Gurgaon two years ago.
It has an overall production capacity of around 110 trailers a month, with 85 trailers produced at its Bangalore plant while 25 come from Gurgaon. Having produced around 50 car carriers per month in 2011, it is currently aiming to utilize around 90 per cent of its existing capacities once the market demand for car and CV carriers stabilizes.
Speaking on his company’s USPs, Mr. Hissaria says: “Quality is the key differentiator between us and the unorganized players with our products being high in quality. The axles are our USP and are manufactured in-house in our own manufacturing unit. These axles give good tyre mileage and require very less maintenance.”
It is a well-known fact that the car and chassis carrier segment in India is heavily dominated by the unorganized sector due to cost factors. The impending shift towards organized players like Tipper and Trailers is majorly in the hands of the customer – the vehicle manufacturer who bears the transportation cost and is hence expected to make the right choices between the organized and unorganized players.
Mr. Hissaria highlights the need for bridging the gap by convincing the vehicle OEMs to shift towards the organized way of vehicle transport. “Actually it is the car or the chassis manufacturers who have the final say. It would be better for them to resort only to organized players considering the fact that the quality of the hauling will not be compromised plus they can be assured that the safety standards will be met in the organized sector”, he explains.
Tippers and Trailers is one of the few organized players in the industry and has a broad base of reputed customers including TCI, VRL, OSL, NYK, Glovis, Mercurio Pallia, Tirupati Translogistics and Janta Roadways, among others. In 2010, it became the first company to develop chassis carriers for the Indian market, Mercurio Pallia being its first customer. As the Indian market is witnessing fast-paced growth in the prime-mover carrier segment, Tippers and Trailers, having sparked off a revolution in the segment, is hoping to homologate with the industry leaders in the automotive segment like Tata Motors and Ashok Leyland. The new development in the chassis carrier space is sure to offer the company plenty of opportunities despite the competing efforts of players in the unorganized segment.
With more emphasis on quality of hauling and stricter enforcement of government regulations, the unorganized sector in the car and truck transport industry, although cannot be ruled out completely, can surely be controlled and limited in the coming years.