Wabco India gears up to provide ABS kits for CVs

Wabco India, which manufactures a range of conventional braking and air-assisted products and systems, is gearing up to serve commercial vehicle manufacturers in the country which will have to factory-fit their trucks and buses with the ABS system come April 1.

Towards this end, the company is setting up a dedicated assembly line at its Chennai facility to make ABS kits for both OEs and the aftermarket. The line will have a capacity to roll out 180,000 kits and Wabco India will invest in the region of Rs 10-12 crore for the line as well as machining work, said P Kaniappan, managing director, Wabco India.

The company is also keen to tap the aftermarket potential for ABS fitment and has trained 120 of its aftersales outlets to retro-fit the ABS kits for existing CVs, which will have to have ABS fitted from October 1.

While the manufacturing through some localisation is one of Wabco India’s priorities for 2015, the other is to localise its OptiDrive automated manual transmission for trucks and buses and accelerate its production, Kaniappan added.

The OptiDrive (pictured above) has been engineered as a modular system and, according to Wabco, can reduce by 50 percent the development time taken by OEs and transmission manufacturers to apply the OptiDrive to their respective platforms.

According to Kaniappan, the company has already made a start by supplying 1,000 sets to Ashok Leyland for fitment in the Janbus which is aimed at city transportation. The company has not yet got key orders for trucks but is at an advanced stage for supplies to Tata Motors’ Ultra and Prima range.

Last year, Wabco India launched its up lift axle control systems for which it had developed the control systems and has made good progress on the sales front.

On other fronts, Wabco India which inaugurated a plant in Lucknow last year and an applications centre at Pune continues to invest for new products as well as in its test-track, located 40km from Chennai. According to Kaniappan, the company wants to be able to test advanced braking system products in India.

While the orders placed by the government as part of JnNURM have helped the company, Kaniappan is hoping for an uptick in the CV sector to boost business for the company. It is also looking at tapping new customers for the ABS system including school buses, ambulances and car carriers. India’s CV sector is in the midst of a slowdown with sales in the April-December period down by 5.65 percent as compared to the year-earlier period.

Wabco India has five manufacturing facilities and employs over 3,000 people. It reported a sales turnover of Rs 1,138 crore in 2013-14.