The last quarter is expected to be the best this year

- Nitin Lall, General Manager, Atlas Copco (India) Ltd, Construction Technique Nitin Lall, General Manager, Atlas Copco (India) Ltd, Construction Technique, elaborates on about the company, its products, future plans and the current market scenario. How do you assess the current construction equipment (CE) market scenario and its growth prospects in the coming two quarters and long term? The CE market is still seeing low demands with the overall activity being sluggish. But we are seeing some positive enquiries in the last quarter of 2014 and hope that these will continue in Q1 of 2015. With the new government now in place, we should see some good growth in the next calendar year. At least the sentiment is much improved. How do you view the growth potential from the road sector? Which are the major areas to be addressed on a war footing? India needs to witness much larger projects than what we are seeing today. With an increase in traffic, most of our roads are choked and the travel time from one place to another has doubled. Therefore, we need a quick announcement of new projects pertaining to the widening of roads, construction of new flyovers and underpasses, and of course, the metro rail in cities with higher population. We need to see faster execution than mere announcements. The biggest area of concern continues to be land acquisition, which prohibits expansion for roads in India. Given the intense competition, and not-so-rosy demand-supply scenario, what has been the company´s core focus in order to provide value addition to its customers? Atlas Copco´s core focus has been on superior product quality and world-class service that ensures value addition, necessary in the current tough demand-supply scenario. Atlas Copco Road Construction Equipment is a part of the construction technique business. We are a world leading manufacturer of compaction and paving equipment, and are highly focused on sustainable productivity for our customers. Worldwide, Atlas Copco road construction equipment has over 100 years of expertise in compaction knowledge and applications, where groundbreaking ideas are transformed into cost-efficient solutions and reliable machines. We focus on creating an entire range of innovative road construction equipment in the country. How would you comment on the company´s overall performance so far in 2014 and to what extent has the slowdown impacted the bottomline? Contrary to the global trend, Atlas Copco Road Construction has actually grown in 2013 with a positive cashflow. The last quarter is expected to be the best in this year. What are your expectations, in terms of growth potential, in another three years? We expect the basic bottlenecks to be removed by the new government. With a large potential, if land acquisition issues and funding to road projects are addressed, the market should be in a position to double up in the next three to four years. (Communication by the management of the company)