OUR BUREAU Daimler India Commercial Vehicles (DICV) has achieved break-even for the first time.

This comes at a time other global truck brands are struggling to make inroads into the Indian truck market, which is still dominated by Tata Motors and Ashok Leyland.

“Within six years of our launch in India, we have achieved break-even. This is the first time an automotive OEM has done this in India within this short period with the scale of investments that we have made,” Satyakam Arya, DICV’s MD and CEO, told a media conference here on Friday.

Jump in sales (by volume) of BharatBenz trucks, both at home and abroad, as also cost-efficiency measures helped achieve break-even in calendar 2018. In 2018, DICV reported 35 per cent growth in its domestic truck sales at 22,532 units (16,717 units in 2017), while exports grew 8 per cent at 7,054 units (6,553). With growing domestic sales, India is now the fifth largest market for Daimler trucks after the US, Indonesia, Japan and Germany.

The company exported its Oragadam factory-built trucks to six more countries in 2018, taking the total number of export destinations to 50.

Also last year, the company started shipping medium duty transmissions to Europe and the Oragadam unit is now an export hub for the gear. With robust sales growth, the company expanded its network to 182 touch points by adding 48 new outlets in 2018, said Arya.

Three-pronged strategy

DICV intends to focus on three areas for the next level of growth — digitalisation, network expansion and product leadership. “We are going to digitalise the entire customer interface. We believe this will help us transform the India CV operations,” said Arya.

In the next two years, DICV plans to double the number of touch points to more than 350 to ensure a BharatBenz outlet is there every 100 km, guaranteeing service support in under two hours.

DICV is enhancing its entire truck portfolio to meet the new axle norms announced in 2018. ‘We will launch numerous products this year,” said Arya.

On BS VI preparation, he said DICV is investing mainly in localisation and customisation as it already has Euro VI technology.

Arya feels the Indian CV market will face challenges in 2019 first half, but the second will be better due to expected pre-buying ahead of BS VI.