Samir Bhowmik, General Manager - Sales, Chowgule & Company Pvt Ltd, Material Handling & Construction Equipment Division highlights the company's operations and international collaborations.Established in 1941, Chowgule and Company Pvt Ltd (CCPL) is the parent company of Chowgule Group of Companies. The company is actively involved with activities as diverse as mining, beneficiation, pelletisation, transportation, export of iron ore and iron ore pellets, shipbuilding and material handling and construction equipment division.What prompted the collaboration with Furukawa Unic Corp? What exactly does this alliance offer the customer?Our association with Japan is over 60 years old. Chowgule has been exporting iron ore to Japan since 1951. Furukawa Unic is a Japanese pioneer of high quality, truck/tractor mounted cranes and is well known worldwide. We find the collaboration enterprising, meeting market expectations in terms of quality, performance and support. This alliance facilitates faster availability of these top class truck-mounted cranes with spares, training, installation guide, etc. The cranes are also available as direct imports from Furukawa Unic.What are the best features of the technology that is part of your product range? How do your cranes reduce the need for labour?The cranes we provide are the straight boom version, with 360-degree slewing. These cranes are mounted on trucks and hence, the complete unit is meant for three works: loading, unloading and transporting by a single equipment and one operator. One operator, who drives the truck, can easily and efficiently operate the crane to handle loading and unloading of the goods, thus reducing additional labour.One of your offerings, the Handyman, can be mounted on vehicles with a GVW of 4 tonne to 9 tonne. What are the features that make it ideal to speed up logistics operations?The Handyman pick-up loaders with all required safety features are designed, manufactured, sold and serviced by us. Like truck-mounted cranes, this lifting equipment does not require scheduling labour, cranes, and the likes. Its winch mechanism with electric motor, wire rope, outrigger and remote control make operations faster. Its lighter weight makes its installation on vehicles faster. Just one operator can install this pick-up loader on the LCV in 30 minutes.You offer two different ranges of truck- mounted cranes. Kindly tell us about them?Our ranges are truck-mounted and tractor-mounted cranes. While truck-mounted ones find use in segments like construction/infrastructure, heavy engineering, ship-building, foundry, mining, construction materials, our tractor-mounted cranes do a perfect job in rough terrain applications like rural electrification. We also have the knuckle boom version in the truck-mounted range.How affordable are the tractor cranes?They are very competitively priced. A complete unit (crane with tractor) can be made available for Rs 12 lakh. For our customers who do not find it feasible to procure the equipment from two different sources, we have started making indigenously-built cranes for both tractors and trucks, and the first lot of cranes will hit the market by mid-September. We also rent out our cranes.Which is your best-selling product?We are probably the only manufacturer/supplier of material handling equipment of capacity ranging from 400 kg to 500,000 kg in the country. In the recent past, we have introduced heavy cranes (both the truck and crawler versions) ranging from 20 tonne to 500 tonne, from Powerplus Group Inc, USA. We are also introducing their tower cranes. Currently, the truck-mounted crane is our bestselling product. The small loader, the Handyman, is expected to become the largest selling product in the near futureHow do you view the market for cranes in India? Which cranes are most suitable to the Indian terrain?As we know, there is a huge allocation of revenue, besides the unspent fund from the Eleventh Five Year Plan for many projects, especially power and infra. Between 2004 and 2006, the Indian earthmoving and construction equipment (ECE) industry's revenues and volumes grew at over 40 per cent per year, reaching US$ 2.3 billion. It is also estimated that the ECE industry is likely to expand five-fold by 2015-2016. As a part of this industry, we are excited about the chance to realise this potential fully and are focused on growth-enabling initiatives like quality enhancement, timely delivery and competitive pricing.(Communication by the management of the company)