Within a few days of Mahindra and Mahindra (M&M) announcing the completion of purchase of the Navistar Group’s stake in Mahindra Navistar Automotives Ltd (MNAL) and Mahindra Navistar Engines Pvt. Ltd (MNEPL), Auto Tech Review spoke to Mr. Nalin Mehta, Managing Director MNAL to understand the roadmap for the company in India henceforth. Increasing market penetration, better understanding of customer requirements and improved product and distribution strategy would be the key growth drivers for the company.
Born in 1958, Mr. Nalin Mehta went on to complete his Bachelor of Technology from IIT, Kharagpur and then followed that up with MBA from Faculty of Management Studies, Delhi University after which he worked with Hindustan Motors for a period of nine years and adding life to the market by launching the Mitsubishi Lancer, which was noticed for many innovative firsts in the Indian Automotive market. He later took over as Chief Operating Officer of MNAL, before taking charge as its Managing Director a year later.
Mr. Nalin Mehta spoke about India being a huge market in itself and by tapping into the right resources the company can reach different heights. At MNAL, we have worked hard to build a great product, a strong product development team, and a modern plant with the best equipments and focusing on improving productivity which are strong reasons for the business to grow. The efforts have largely been directed towards giving the customers a delightful experience by filling-in small gaps in the industry by offering services like a 24x7 call centre and four years of unlimited warranty and focusing on improving productivity.
We are working towards the use of reefer vans which has great scope and potential in the market as there exists an excise benefit if reefer vans are sold directly by a manufacturer. The use of reefer vans would lower operating costs and increase fuel efficiency. Along with reefer vans, we are creating sub-segments in the 25-49 tonne segments offering concrete mixtures integrated with the truck along with looking at readymade, customized solutions.
However, it is known that the trucking industry is very heterogeneous in nature and the biggest challenge faced is real world usage information. As the industry does not organize itself well, for instance, the operators are not able to share the kind of data a developer would want. Hence there is a necessity for more and more accurate real world information, so one can stimulate it.
We are a rising player in the market with a market share of 11% in LCV business; a business that M&M was already in. As far as the HCV’s are concerned, there are about 7,000 HCV’s in the market today with a steady increase in market share month-on-month. We saw an increased market share this January at 4.2%.
Our future looks bright and promising as we are well-positioned to take advantage of a situation which is moving towards modernization. Their focus will remain unchanged from the modern, youth transporter, offering superior services and packaged services.