Quality, not price!
It is often said that India is a price sensitive market. But Singh believes that playing on the pricing strategy is not good for the long term. It hurts the industry as well as the company. Quality is what counts, he believes. "I personally believe that quality counts. At the end of the day, our customer appreciates quality. So we have been focused on quality. What we have been doing is that we have been working on our vendors to enhance the quality. We are asking our dealers to invest to improve their infrastructure. We have also changed many manufacturing process at our plants," he states. Obviously, doing all this costs money and there was a time when the company was making losses. "So we corrected ourselves and decided to educate the customer that if we are going to provide a very good product and good service then it will cost some money," he adds.

There is a need for equipment in the market. When there is need of equipment, the customer wants to finish his job faster and he wants to have peace of mind. "For that, we are giving him better quality machines as well as prompt and excellent service. As a result, his machine is up and running most of the time. So the customer has realised that this is the company he has to rely on. And it is paying us good results. Today's customers understand the long term benefits of buying a good machine rather than looking at the initial cost of buying. As far as we are concerned, we are not in the business of gaining market share by reducing our pricing or by giving discounts," he emphasises.

Skill development
Tata Hitachi has been a pioneer when it comes to skill development centres and operator training schools in its segment in India. "Today, getting skilled operators is the biggest challenge in our industry. We have our premium range of machines but we do not have enough trained operators who can operate these equipment. We don't have operators who can use the advanced features of these machines. So it is very important for us to train the operators. And many times we sell a machine, we also have to provide operator to the customer," he informs. In line with this strategy, Tata Hitachi has revamped all its operator training centres. "We provide on-the-machine training at these operator training centres. We also have technical centres at Dharwad and Kharagpur. At these technical centres, we provide training to our own field technicians, dealership technicians and customer technicians," he adds.

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