Ashok Leyland, the flagship Hinduja company, is on a product offensive with 15 new launches scheduled this financial year.

In FY22, the company launched 22 products. The company is going big on CNG and will introduce new tippers, tractors, Intermediate Commercial Vehicles, buses and more CNG products, Sanjeev Kumar, head of the medium and heavy commercial vehicles (MHCV), Ashok Leyland said while talking to the media in the city early this week.

The company enjoys a 31 per cent overall market share in India.

"We launched a product every month in FY22. The slew of product launches was necessitated by the shift to BSVI. There was a gap in the portfolio that we filled up," said Kumar.

"With commercial vehicles, after-sales servicing is very crucial. Customers buy and run the vehicles that fetch revenue for them. He cannot afford to keep his vehicles idle for long. To improve our market share, we need to be able to serve our customers and improve our response time to his service calls," said Kumar.

The company has started providing at-site support to customers in mining pockets and also at road construction sites.

"We visit sites, understand applications and identify the latent needs of customers which make it to the drawing board of our product development team," said the company official.

In response to e-commerce customers, Ashok Leyland provides at-site support on the Delhi-Mumbai, Delhi-Hyderabad, and Delhi-Bangalore routes and restores vehicles in eight hours. Regarding its focus on CNG, Kumar said: "CNG volumes keep changing because the price difference between CNG and diesel is only Rs 20. We are launching a number of products with CNG powertrain this year."

With the commercial vehicle segment doing well as the economy is doing well, the growth in the CV segment in FY23 is slated to be 48 per cent.

The company which has a capital expenditure of Rs 500-700 crore in FY23 is also focussing on developing alternate fuel technology. It has already supplied 29 Hydrogen buses to Reliance Industries. The Electric Vehicle percentage in the CV segment is less than 1-2 per cent.

Courtesy: The Telegraph, BS, Auto Car Pro, FE