TATRA TRUCKS makes the first renewed deliveries to the Indian Army

11 September, 2015

After two and a half years under new management, the Koprivnice truck factory TATRA TRUCKS a.s. is still doing better. Last year the company sold 850 vehicles and employed 850 people, this year they aim to exceed 900 vehicles produced.

Approximately three quarters of the truck maker’s production are intended for export, as evidenced by large contracts and positive references from all over the world, such as Norway, Saudi Arabia and Russia. After two years, a successful comeback to another key market was managed - to India, where the first supplies of Tatra assembly kits are currently directed.

The Indian Army is historically one of the world's largest users of Tatra chassis, which makes India a strategically very important market. You would count around 8,000 Tatra units in the army and only in the period from 2003 to 2012 up to 3,925 assembly sets were delivered there, assembled by the Indians themselves, who then mounted their own superstructures on them based on their needs. On average, it was less than one third of the truck maker’s production; in 2010 even 56% of total annual production went to India. Unfortunately, there was a problem with the quality of the supply of non-original spare parts that were not manufactured in Koprivnice, and a shareholder of the former Tatra owner (Tatra a.s.), who mediated such deliveries to the Indian market, was investigated due to a suspicion of corruption. All shipments from Koprivnice to India were stopped in 2012 because of this scandal.

A major breakthrough occurred in February this year, when a memorandum was signed between the TATRA TRUCKS a.s. and the Indian national enterprise BEML in Bangalore, India, historically providing the final assembly of Tatra trucks for the Indian market from supplied kits. This opened the way to specific orders for chassis and parts, primarily for the Indian security forces. In July this year, contracts were signed for the supply of 260 semi-knocked-down kits for final assembly in India, out of which 120 will be delivered in three batches this year.

"During the July negotiations, which enabled the commencement of deliveries of TATRA components to India after more than 2 years, the most difficult task was to convince business partners that our company will be a long-term and honest partner for the supplies of components for the assembly of TATRA vehicles in India and that our prices offered are advantageous to BEML, and we finally succeeded in that," says David Pipal, supervising over sales and marketing at Tatra since the end of 2014. "These contracts bring significant and stable source of orders for the whole plant until the middle of next year and we can expect that volumes will continue to grow," adds Pipal and points to more than 8,000 TATRA vehicles serving in the Indian Army, which will need to be gradually diversified.

"The specifics of the negotiations we have held with the Indian partners, was that although the mutual negotiations were long, we always arrived at the conclusion 5 minutes prior to departure," says exaggerating the specifics of the negotiations Karel Ritschel, managing the department of defense programs in Tatra since April 2015.

In addition to the serially produced KD kits, Tatra strategically focuses on the development and production of niche vehicles in small batches exactly according to customer requirements. Currently, however, we have completely filled production capacity and given the long-term growth of orders, we need to hire dozens of new employees, mainly in technical positions. Operators are needed both for new machine tools, as well as engineers and designers, who are missing in the labour market in longer term.

So, after a steep fall one of the oldest automobile manufacturers in the world has begun a journey to rebirth and the current results have exceeded the original expectations of owners and managers. In our conditions, this is a unique case of such a rapid recovery of production and sales in the domestic market and abroad.