每日吃瓜

bauma CONEXPO is returning after a gap of almost four years. What has been the past experience at the event?
bauma CONEXPO is the largest show in Northern India in the construction equipment sector with a penetrated focus on construction equipment and machinery. This show has the ability to drive Indias building and construction industry which is showing a great boom due to the various schemes announced by the Prime Minister to boost infrastructure. We expect the upcoming edition of bauma CONEXPO to be much larger and better compared to all previous editions. Just like always we expect meaningful conversations, new opportunities, unexplored markets, knowledge-rich conferences, and business-to-business meetings with a greater and more focused approach.

Like any other exhibition, we expect our new prospects to drop by our booth with their requirements for high-end concrete block plants. In addition to this, we are also looking forward to meeting our existing customers to discuss in detail their plans for expansion, higher capacity machines, forward and backward integration with automation and to discuss their requirement of moulds for value-added premium concrete products with our mould sales team.

What are the key products on display during bauma CONEXPO? Explain in detail.
As per a recent assessment by Fortune Business Insights, the global construction equipment market, valued at $133.37 billion in 2020 is expected to grow from $141.99 billion in 2021 to $222.14 billion in 2028. In India, construction equipment sector volumes are expected to grow 2.5 to 3 times their current size by 2030. This shall boost the concrete equipment sector, building equipment, and civil engineering sector including residential, commercial, and industrial. A major learning for the construction sector during the pandemic has been ways to navigate strict safety protocols while maintaining productivity.

Technological advancements have ensured remote work sites and mobile access to their bottom line. To be in line with this opportunity, Columbia helps our customers to closely monitor operations in their plant, check their output, raw material usage, wastage, and much more by introducing IoT devices at our customer plants remotely. This data shall help in further improvements in their plant outputs and uptime. The trial run is successfully taking place at the sites of two of our valued customers for the last 18 months and this year further extending the monitoring at two more locations. Going forward by 2024, this would become a standard feature in all our plants.

Due to the inconsistent availability of manpower and the need for higher outputs, our customers are slowly shifting towards automation with Columbia Model SPM26 and 30 automatic plants. Due to the market need for a higher level of automation and output, we are introducing a Model 50 machine with Pallet Transporter System and Cuber in India. Our quality-conscious customers have started producing 35 mm tiles on our SPM 20 plant to ensure consistency in the quality of the product and to gain a niche in the market.

How was the year 2022 in terms of performance? What are your company's plans for 2023?
The entire industry witnessed huge ups and downs in the last two years. The rapid growth suddenly came to a standstill in March 2020, and there were a lot of apprehensions about the market scenario and the way it would turn in 2021/22. This adversely impacted the pace of the construction industry in the country and also the supply chain disruptions on the other hand. From January 2022, things started getting better but not as good as the pre covid period.

However, from March 2022, it has shifted gears and we have seen an improved market, newer demands, repeat orders, and higher confidence among the buyers. The numbers have improved drastically for us with top-line growth of 30 per cent as compared to 2019 numbers. We are quite optimistic for 2023 and in the coming years as well. We plan to grow in 2023 by 13 per cent growth in the top line with SPM 20, SPM20+, auto handling of SPM20, SPM26, SPM30, and Model 50.

In addition to this, we are aggressively expanding our reach to global markets. Till 2021, we were more focussed on moulds meant for Columbia Machines, in 2023 we have already enhanced our manufacturing capacities by half-board machine moulds. We look forward to a great contribution to the top line in this segment.