I’ve travelled much since the last issue of this magazine, including a week-long tour of leading OEMs and medium-sized firms across Asia. What struck me loud and clear during that trip was the exciting level of innovation and ambition shown by many of the senior figures within Asia-based firms that I’ve had the pleasure to spend time with.
Huge figures are being invested by two leading Chinese manufacturers in order to fulfil their global commercial vision of becoming major international players, with one investing in a new state-of-the-art R&D centre eventually to attract over 1,000 engineers tasked with creating highly competitively priced, yet still sophisticated, equipment models. The same firm also described how they were, for the first time, manufacturing more excavators than wheeled loaders, in line with demand from domestic customers. Could other Chinese and Asian country-based manufacturers follow this change in production volume emphasis? We shall see.
I also found it interesting to hear how emergent-based manufacturers are targeting Africa, South East Asia and Latin America as offering the strongest growth potential over the short- to mid-term. Some firms said they were looking to exhibit for the first time at shows in these regions over the next 18 months.
There was also talk during my Asia trip of how China, along with Brazil, is moving to Tier 3 Standard for construction equipment diesel model engine emissions in 2015. While this is to be welcomed, OEMs are now looking to comply with future European and US Tier 5/Stage V emissions standards, thus creating something of a paradox: as selling more lower emissions standard models to emerging market customers will help fund costly research into Tier 5/Stage V model solutions.
There has been much talk about how sanctions imposed by the EU and the US against Russia over its role in the ongoing Ukraine conflict may affect aggregates industry trading. It will be interesting to see whether this leads to increased aggregates-related construction equipment trading between Russia and Asian nations.
The Russian quarrying market is the focus of this edition’s Quarry Profile, as we look at how Koelga Quarry, the largest marble quarry in Russia and one of the world’s largest, is benefiting in terms of both operational efficiency and increased productivity from the use of state-of-the-art crushing equipment provided by a leading Europe-based OEM.
Trading between emergent market superpowers was in the news during my time in China, with President Xi Jinping’s first official visit to India for talks with the country’s new Prime Minister Narendra Modi coinciding with the announcement of China’s plan to invest US$20 billion in Indian industrial infrastructure projects over the next five years. Such investment will create great demand for aggregates and provides hard cash evidence of the importance of emerging nations to securing global growth for our industry.
As we move towards the end of 2014, two huge shows are taking place within ABI’s marketplace. bauma China 2014 in Shanghai 24-27 November, and bC India in Delhi 15-18 December will be the places to be within the global aggregates-related construction equipment sector. It promises to be an exciting and hopefully sales-strong end to the year.
Guy Woodford, Editor
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