Exclusive Interview: Unveiling JOST's Expansion in Chennai with Joachim Dürr, CEO

Well, first of all, thank you very much. And indeed you're right: India is a little bit like a second home. I come to India since more than 20 years, and I must say I'm really impressed with the development that India has taken in the last few years. It's always been a lot of potential, and when I worked here in early 2000s, every year a little bit happened. Now I'm away for half a year, a year, and things have duplicated or tripled, so the accelerating path is really impressive. I think with the young population that India has, it has a great way to go, and there's a good basis now. You see a lot of foreign investments coming in, and I'm very happy to inaugurate today a big foreign investment for the JOST company. It's important to us because it's important for our customers. It's that simple. In India we have one very strong agricultural tractor company, so they are growing worldwide, and it's good to be with them here in India so that we can align very easily with their development, with their production strategies, and with their logistics strategies. That's one reason why it's important. Secondly, of course, India is a very competitive place to manufacture, so we have a very competitive manufacturing site that also serves our Indian customer but also other customers. Thirdly, it's important because we want to be with the big OEMs in a way so that we can serve them globally. It's important because the development of new vehicles is getting more and more expensive. Integration of electronics, integration of hydraulics, powertrains with emission regulations, with hydrogen, with electric battery, with fuel cells — all these developments have to happen parallel, and they make the platforms much more complex. Most of the large OEMs in tractors but also in trucks have global platforms that they develop, and they only want to integrate one partner, because the physical integration with exhaust systems here and the much more complex packaging, plus the hydraulics integration, making sure that the lines are connected well and the routing of the lines, including on top of that the electronic integration, making sure that the functions of our loaders, of our fifth wheels, of our products are in the display of the vehicle and the safety protocols are combined — these integrations are more and more complex, and they only want to do it once for the whole platform. So if you are one of the large Indian tractor manufacturers or one of the European truck manufacturers, you have your global platform and you want your partner to be with you wherever you produce the vehicle. That's why we are here in India. It's our second base here in India. We started the first plant 15 years ago, we had a great development, and this has been an impressive journey. The team here built this plant physically in a matter of 9 months — for us Germans, unthinkable. That's what it would take to get the permits in Germany, or it would take even longer. From the groundbreaking to the first loader out of the door was only one year. Records. Team effort. A lot of good support from the region, from the chamber, but also a very solid team that we already had in Jamshedpur and that could build this up. So it has been a great story so far, and we get very good feedback from our customers, and we're looking to fill this plant quickly with new products.

Right now, you can think about 25 to 30% of our turnover is agricultural products, so it's already quite a good size. But we see growth opportunities. We will grow quicker in that area than in trucks, for the simple reason that we are not everywhere in the world today. On trucks and trailers, we are global market leader. You can buy a JOST fifth wheel, a JOST landing leg, a JOST kingpin anywhere in the world. With loaders, we are very strong in Europe, very strong in North America, but we have a lot of other regions that we can grow, so that's why we see faster growth rates. It is an important business to us. The mechanisms are very similar. I consider both commercial vehicles because they are vehicles for commercial use: ones are vehicles for transport, the others are vehicles for agriculture, others are vehicles for construction, but they are commercial use of the vehicles, and that's why it fits very well to our business model. We are closely integrated with the OEM, we are part of their development teams, we meet all the standards for functional safety and all the ISO certificates that you need to have to produce for the OEMs, but we're also very close to the customers, to the dealers in the regions, and therefore it's an important investment. The agriculture segment in general is important to us because it follows the same mechanisms. We can use a lot of the things that we know well, a lot of the value drivers that we have to offer to our customers, OEMs, dealers, and final users. We can use them also for this segment, and the growth opportunities are larger because we have a lot more area that is uncovered today, so we can fill a lot of white spots. Makes a lot of sense. We're doing that with necessary investments. We have taken over a company in Brazil where we will produce our loaders, and we're inaugurating today here the plant for loaders in India that will serve the Asia market.

It's very important, but it's a combination of everything. It's important because it's a very competitive manufacturing base also for the world, but there's also a lot of capabilities in India, very well educated people — if it is IT or any other functions or R&D. So I expect that we will also see our staff in IT and R&D growing, and that we will move development work from Europe or North America to India. On top of that, it's a big market for our products. We are seeing growth rates in commercial vehicles, trucks, especially with the truck tractors and the semi-trailers. We see a big shift with the new regulations that we see more articulated vehicles, so it's a fast growing market. Also on loaders, it's not a large market today, but we see with more mechanized agriculture, and India has a lot of people that need food, and agriculture is still at a point where with more mechanization you can really increase the output of the agriculture, and therefore we expect that it will be a good and growing market. It is already a market in the sense that we have a lot of Indian OEMs — I mentioned Mahindra, ITL — big tractor manufacturers that work in India and work outside of India. They are Indian customers, you could consider them Indian market players even though some of their products go outside of India. So very important, very strategic. I think right now India is at a turning point. As I mentioned, I'm coming to India for more than 20 years now, and when I was here last year, that was the first time after COVID, I was really impressed: all the infrastructure changes, the airports are new, the streets are much better than they used to be. Still a lot of potential, no question, but you see the ship is turning, and it's turning in the right direction.

No, not really. But it's always a pleasure to be here. The interest that you see in the people, the openness — it's just a lot of fun to work here in India, and it has been a real pleasure to pull off this plant because we started from zero. We had the idea in Sweden, we had the products designs in Sweden, we had some experience in China, and we had a great team on the ground that pulled all the information together and made it happen in record time. That's just something that's really fulfilling if you are in the industry and if you're trying to move things. So great spirit, and I see that great spirit all over India.