Tushar Mehendale at that time had only recently returned to India, after completing his engineering studies in the USA. His youth has apparently proved no barrier to success. “Over the past nine years, we have managed to grow consistently, year-on-year, at a compounded annual growth rate of 55%,” he says. “This high growth was realised primarily due to development on two fronts: growth in the Indian economy and our increased market penetration and market share.”
Mehendale describes ElectroMech’s philosophy as being “a solutions provider and not just a supplier of cranes”. He adds: “It is one thing pulling out a catalogue and selling cranes, but it is a totally different ball game when one has to sit with the customer, understand their handling requirements, appreciate their plant layouts, understand the constraints, provide information on wheel loads and crane geometry, suggest alternatives to their architects and structural consultants, handhold the customer and guide him towards selection of the most optimum equipment that will satisfy his need. We believe that a ‘service’ approach to selling is more important. Customers appreciate this approach and are happy to involve us right from the project conceptualisation stage.”
ElectroMech is the exclusive representative of Abus in India and roughly a third of the cranes that it builds are made from complete kits from Abus. “In some cases,” Mehendale says, “we need to incorporate some additional features on the cranes as per customer requirements. Here, we pick and choose items from the Abus kit and integrate various mechanical, electrical and electronic components to come up with a crane as per the customer requirements. In certain cases where we are unable to use Abus kits, we custom engineer cranes based on an open winch type of design and import geared brake motors from reputable international suppliers.”
As well as Abus wire rope hoists, ElectroMech can also offer its own EL Series range of wire rope hoists, designed to better suit the needs (and budgets) of small workshops and light-duty applications. These hoists, up to 32t SWL, are based on the simple and long-established conical rotor technology.
Mehendale says that over the years ElectroMech has built a reputation for “quality, on-time delivery and prompt services” and adds that “these attributes are propagated throughout the market more by word-of-mouth giving us a lot of referential business as well as repeat business.”
Today ElectroMech has close to 350 employees, across its nationwide sales and service network. It has offices in New Delhi, Jamshedpur, Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Bangalore and Chennai. It also has residential service engineers stationed at other industrial hubs around the country, such as Rudrapur and Coimbatore.
“With a network like this, we are always close to our customers and our response times are very low,” Mehendale says. “Hence a potential customer feels comfortable in dealing with us. Given our philosophy of doing business we believe more in direct selling than selling through a dealer network. This approach ensures that our supply chain does not have any ‘padding’ and that we can offer very competitive prices to our customers.”
Manufacturing is centred at the headquarters in Pune, although a secondary plant is being built in Chennai to cater for customers in the south of the country. Mehendale says that the Chennai factory will be producing cranes by the third quarter of the year, with an initial capacity of 200 cranes a year. Coupled with an expansion of the Pune factory that is underway, planned production capacity will reach approximately 2,000 cranes a year.
He says: “With a view to be always ahead of the curve and to handle requirements of higher capacity, we have been consistently investing in purchasing additional land adjacent to our main plant near Pune and have currently enough land to see us through for the next five years projected growth. Furthermore, our decision to set up an additional manufacturing facility in Chennai also substantially boosts our capacity.”
Current projects include the commissioning of more than 100 cranes at a new plant in Coimbatore in the south for Hansen Drives, which makes gearboxes for wind turbines. All these cranes were supplied from Abus kits and range in SWL from 500kg up to 45t.
ElectroMech is also commissioning three 50t double girder cranes with 33.4m spans at Gestamp, a subsidiary of Volkswagen, in Pune. This plant will supply press components to the new Volkswagen plant opening up nearby.
“In addition to this, we also recently completed a project of 47 overhead cranes for Pipavav Shipyard Ltd in the state of Gujarat,” says Mehendale. “These cranes have SWLs ranging from 3.2t to 20t, with spans ranging from 10m to 45m. All these cranes have been built using Abus kits. These cranes are used in the block building facility of this ambitious shipyard project, which is considered currently to be the largest operational shipyard in the country.”
