UNSHAKEABLE CONFIDENCE!

We believe India will recover sooner and better from the crisis than many other economies and growth would start to return in 2021. In the next 2-3 years, the CV industry could return to the market volumes we saw in 2019, says Satyakam Arya, MD & CEO, Daimler India Commercial Vehicles (DICV)

- Niranjan Mudholkar

You have been in charge of the current role since November 1, 2018. How would you describe the journey so far?

The journey so far has been exciting, challenging and filled with new learnings. In 2018, our focus on profitable growth paid offas we witnessed one of the best performance years in the history of DICV. We also observed excellent results in bus sales and exports as well. Despite the weak market scenario in 2019, we managed to continue our growth trajectory and break even. We also successfully increased our touch points in 2019 by 30 percent over 2018.

This year we have celebrated several milestones; our BSVI premiere, over one lakh BharatBenz trucks on Indian roads, more than 30,000 accumulated truck exports, our second MoU with the government of Tamil Nadu, and so much more.

With the lockdowns easing, and markets making a small, yet spirited comeback, we are seeing a slow recovery of the market and a strong demand for BharatBenz BSVI products. This once again proves the confidence the customers have in our products and BSVI technology. In fact, we have recently started a second shift at our plant and we continue to ramp up our operations and supply chain while maintaining high level of precautions. In a nut shell, personally it has been a very exciting journey filled with lot of learning.

How has the Covid-19 pandemic affected DICV?