Gibraltar, an established name in the Indian air spring industry, has built on its strengths in the aftermarket space to become a clear leader in the replacement market. Any State Transport Undertaking (STU) in India which runs air suspension buses cannot afford to miss Gibraltar, a company making steady progress. The demand for quality air springs at competitive prices has always been present in the industrial segment, ever since Gibraltar’s CMD & Founder, Mr. Pronob Kumar Guha, established the company in 1993. Gibraltar launched a limited range of air springs for industrial applications in April this year and given the overwhelming response, the company plans to expand its product offering in the next couple of years. The Kolkata-based firm has also developed air springs for railway and trailer applications and will be launching them on a global platform in the near future.
In a one-on-one interview with MOTORINDIA, Mr. Arpan Basu, Director, Marketing & Product Development, lists down his company’s plans for the next four years: “We are very much focused with regards to our targets for 2020 and call it “2020 Vision”. These four years are going to be very important for Gibraltar as we have lot of deliverables up our sleeve. Gibraltar is targeting Rs. 100 crores turnover by 2020. We also plan to increase the production capacity for automobile air springs to at least ten times by then and that will help us achieve economies of scale.”
Gibraltar has already achieved great success with regards to its quality, as proved by the orders it has bagged from European customers, both aftermarket ones and OEMs, who were previously using air springs from other multinational brands. However, its products are yet to compete with Chinese and Turkish air spring manufacturers with regards to pricing. “We are confident of achieving more competitive pricing by scaling up our production by 2020. We have almost doubled our production over the last 12 months and are planning for aggressive growth year-on-year”, adds Mr. Basu.
On the export front, Gibraltar is aggressively marketing its products in the Middle East, Korea and parts of Europe. It has concrete plans to attract the global market and increase its exports substantially in the coming years.
In order to further strengthen its manufacturing capability, the company has installed machines with higher production capacity and advanced technology. Gibraltar’s existing production infrastructure has been designed in such a way that the production capacity can be increased by 10 times with nominal increase in machine count as and when necessary.
Given the fact that strong finances play a vital role in growth and expansion, Gibraltar has been working on equity funding and is in talks with various financial investors as well as strategic partners. The company also has ambitious plans to go for a public issue in the next five years.
Outlining the company’s top priorities for the future, he concludes: “Our top priorities would be to export our products to global automotive OEMs and aftermarket customers and parallely focus on the global and domestic railway and industrial segments.”
By Rajeswari Prasad