Hyundai Const plans to make India as export base

New Delhi: Hyundai Construction Equipment India, a wholly owned subsidiary of the $ 20-billion Korea-based Hyundai Heavy Industries, said that it would make the country an export base to serve markets in South, West Asia as well as Europe.

“Currently, we are focusing on gaining a strong market share here. But the long-term plan is to make India an export hub to sell in markets in West Asia and Europe due to the logistic advantage,” said Mr J.S. Kim, the company’ Managing Director while inaugurating the company’s northern regional office here.

He said that initially the company would focus on entrenching its position in the domestic market. Of its global product portfolio in the range of 8-80 ton, the Indian arm plans to produce its 20-ton excavator by the end of this month, 11-ton next year and 8-ton equipment the year later. Till now, the construction equipment major had only been importing even since it begun its operations last year.

The company said that of its annual capacity of 10,000 units at its Pune facility, in the current year it would sell 200 units and from next year it expects to sell 700 units on an yearly basis.

“We would have the capacity to produce 2,500 units on a single shift basis from next year onwards. We expect the demand to be up to 700 units for the next consecutive two years. So we would not be producing at the optimum capacity,” said Mr Suvendu Moitra, Head, Marketing.

He said that as the company would start selling locally produced excavators in the range of Rs 42-46 lakhs, it was entering in to a segment which constituted 55 per cent of the construction equipment market. In addition, as it would start producing 11-ton and 8-ton of excavators, it would be present in the products which make 75 per cent of the market.

At present, the market is dominated by leading players like Telco, followed by L&T, Volvo amongst others. By 2010, the company is aiming to capture 7-8 per cent of the market and increase it to 12 per cent in another three-four years.

The demand from mining applications’, irrigation, rural infrastructure is expected to boost the demand for construction equipment to 13,000 units this year as against 9,600 units last year.