Engines and power equipment maker Cummins India has said the demand in most of the segments that the company caters to has come back strongly even as supply chain issues remain a challenge for the industry.
In an interview with PTI, Cummins India Managing Director Ashwath Ram said the Hydrogen Energy Mission, announced in the Union Budget for this fiscal, will boost the company’s business as Cummins has made significant investments in these areas.
“Demand is pretty robust and we seem to have bounced back strongly. Between the third quarter and fourth quarter, we were operating at around 80-90 per cent or 95 per cent across all of the plants,” Ram told PTI.
Segment-wise, he said, demand in power generation space and everything related to infrastructure, healthcare, rental, data centre and technology have come back strongly. The company is seeing demand pretty robust in most of the segments he added.
Ram said there are several challenges in the market mainly related to supply chain, with supply of electronics remaining a global constraint and that this problem is likely to last at least a couple of quarters.
“We are trying to maximise the sales based on the availability of parts,” he added.
He said the company has still not opened its offices and based on the second wave, they are unlikely to be opened in the next couple of months.
Ram, however, said the second wave is unlikely to have much impact on the manufacturing sector as both people and the government are better prepared this time round along with the availability of the vaccine as well.
The Maharashtra government is not shutting down manufacturing and business like they had done earlier, he said. “I think everyone has learnt from the previous cycle that did harm to the business so badly that it is difficult to recover,” he said. Ram said that the government is pushing a policy towards cleaner and greener power and use of hydrogen by setting up the National Hydrogen Energy Mission, which are significant from Cummins perspective.