Sun shines on EHCV market

There is a spirit of optimism in the extra-heavy commercial vehicle (EHCV) market and the industry has seen amazing month-on-month growth in comparison with last year’s figures.

According to Bruce Dickson, deputy chief executive of MAN, the company shares this optimism and he believes that MAN has huge potential to grow.

He says the industry is definitely recovering after the global economic crisis.

In June of this year, sales were 78,2% higher than in June 2010. On average, the industry registered growth of 49,2% for the first seven months of 2011 when compared with the same period of last year.

“However, we are all aware of what is happening globally on the economic front and we realise that we need to take note of trends and be prepared for all possible global effects. Of course, nobody knows exactly what the future will hold. In the meantime, we remain optimistic.”

In July MAN achieved a market share of 14,4% in the EHCV segment reported by NAAMSA. The company is aiming to achieve an overall 12% market share in this segment by the end of 2011.

“Our recently launched TGS WW has been extremely well received in the market and we have managed to break into new fleets where we have previously not been major players. Feedback from our customers is that they are experiencing growth opportunities in their various business segments including cross-border and this bodes well for new truck sales as well.

“I firmly believe that we have an excellent product in that our vehicles are extremely fuel efficient and with rising fuel costs, savings on fuel becomes increasingly important to our customers. And they know that they can rely on MAN making our customers operations ‘Consistently Efficient’.

“We also take pride in our technical reliability and the low cost of ownership that we can offer our customers. We really set the cat among the pigeons when we launched the TGS WW with our standard four-year/600 000 km factory warranty last year. This shows our customers how much confidence we have in our products. This warranty also impacts on the rate of repair and maintenance contracts, thus reducing the cost of ownership even further,” he says.

“MAN is also very serious about after-sales service. The salesman sells the first truck and the after sales sells the future vehicles. Our plan is to grow our market share in 2012 further by a focused strategy of sustaining existing business, penetrating competition fleets, offering added value to our customers by way of fuel efficiency, technical reliability, lowest TCO and most importantly professional after sales service.

“Our long-term goal is to position and secure a place as one of the top two players in the market. We strive to be the ‘Customers first choice’ and we are focused as an organization on ‘Relationships not Deals’. We are very excited about the future as so much potential to grow exists for our truck business”, says Dickson.