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INDIA
Marangoni GRP Targets 50 Franchisees in Coming Years
couple of years. They are also the largest selling BB dealer in the country with over 8,000 trucks on Kerala roads within 6 years. Every third truck on Kerala roads belongs to the BB brand.
Now the retread JV is moving forward to appoint more franchisees in the South, Western, Central and Eastern parts of India. “We are looking forward to appointing five more partners including in key cities like Coimbatore, Chennai, Mumbai and states like West Bengal, Gujarat and Chattisgarh. They are at various levels of appointment,” he stated.
There is no hurry in expanding the network as the objective is to scout partners that gel with the global brand. “We are in no hurry to bring more franchisees on board as haste does not pay in the longer run. We intend to be identified as a technology driven venture rather volume driven,” emphasised Gandhi. The promoters believe that volumes come at a later stage but now the focus is on finding the right partners.
ASEAN market in the future.”
Sharing observations on the Indian retread industry Martin Kalagin, Marangoni, Retreading Systems Director of Asian Operations, added, “India is a very interesting market - though still largely basic, but it has a strong desire to improve and upgrade, indicating huge potential.”
Marangoni has already started to manufacture equipment in India “We have actually moved mountains by customising a European standard Ringtread builder for Indian conditions and price-expectations without losing any of its functionality of quality aspects,” stated Kalagin. “We have designed an Indianised variant of the Ringtread builder, which is more electro-mechanical and not electronic, considering voltage fluctuations, which is more robust and much simpler to operate,” he explained. The Italian retread major company also finds it right to have some of the standard equipment like Process Monorails and buffers, produced locally by Indian
Harsh Gandhi and Mohamed Farzad (in front), Giuseppe Marangoni with M A M Babu Moopan, Chairman and Managing Director, Nippon Group
The Indian retread market is transforming, moving towards improving retread technology and production efficiencies. Meanwhile, the global retread majors are anticipating the opportunity and forming strategic alliances in a retread market that continues to grow. Against this background, the Marangoni GRP retread venture has outlined ambitious growth plans that will expand the company’s footprint with a pan-India franchisee network in the years to come. “We are targeting 50 franchisees in different parts of India in the next few years,” revealed Harsh Gandhi, Director, Marangoni GRP Pvt Ltd and Joint Managing Director in GRP Ltd.
The Indo-Italian venture has plans to move swiftly in the next year. “We are targeting 10 franchisees by end of the on-going fiscal year in March 2019,” Gandhi confided in an interaction on the sideline of the opening of the first Ringtread franchisee in Kochi recently. The retread venture is zeroing-in on partners or franchisees cautiously, adding value to the evolving brand in the vast Indian retread market that is steadily shaping into a more organised structure. “We managed to acquire Autobahn Trucking Corporation as a partner, the Kerala dealer for Bharat
Benz Trucks, which was keen on entering into retreading as an extension of its servicing package to its expanding trucking clientele. Autobahn is a perfect fit as it is the fastest growing Bharat Benz (BB) truck dealer in India and opens access for the retread venture to the CV market in Kerala and adjoining Karnataka state,” he explained.
The truck dealer has called its retread subsidiary ‘Autobahn Retreading’. The trucking and retread ventures are owned by Nippon Group, a diversified transport company, which also has a Toyota dealership in the coastal state.
With the retreading industry moving towards a wave of modernisation, the highly rated trucking company decided to enter into the retreading sector. “Marangoni’s splice-less technology is still not known to the Indian trucking community, and the idea is to introduce new splice-less retreads into the market, which offers lots of growth potential in the near future,” stated Mohamed Farzad, Managing Director, Autobahn Retreading.
Autobahn Trucking has been awarded the "Best CV dealer in India" by the Federation of Automobile Dealers Association (FADA) for the past
Initially, the JV is marketing Marangoni equipment in the Indian market and is graduating to producing locally for the domestic market. “We also started building RingTread builders in our Solapur site (South West of Maharashtra state) about six months ago, and first of the prototypes is now ready,” he revealed. Giuseppe Marangoni, Marangoni Group’s Vice President stated; “Growing radialisation of the Indian trucking fleets brings us to the Indian market. Currently, around 50% of the truck fleets operate on radials.”
Mr. Marangoni, who flew to India to open the first ‘RingTread’ franchisee at Kalady (Ernakulam), was upbeat about the Kerala partner. “We have a great product and Autobahn is a great service provider,” he commented. When asked if Marangoni has plans to expand the India model to other markets in the Asia-Pacific region, he replied; “India is a big project at the moment, and we look forward to developing the venture on a pan- Indian basis. We could also think to replicate the India model in the
Engineering companies and to give European design and technology input to these producers, instead of importing all the equipment from Europe.
Currently, the JV offers four tread brands i.e. starting with the top line product Ringtread followed by Kontur, Unitread and Classico.
The JV established a pilot plant in Indore, a trucking hub in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh and operated in for the last couple of years. Indore was chosen to be the Pilot Plant for Marangoni-GRP opened at the end of 2015 to test the Indian market and fine-tune its go-to- market strategy, followed by franchisee appointments in Karnataka and Haryana.
Operating under the tagline “Going the Extra Mile”, the venture also travels the extra mile with the partner by conducting staff training and reviewing the process operation regularly to maintain quality standards and to keep pace with the latest trends.
42 Retreading Business