Capital Equipment News January 2019

INTERVIEW

Dries Lottering, manufacturing renewal executive at Bridgestone South Africa.

Despite negative projections at the start of 2018, the truck market defied the odds to record slight growth during a difficult year. Raimo Lehtiö, MD of Scania South Africa, believes the market will remain in survival mode in 2019. During such a low growth period, Scania South Africa has prioritised the development of its service footprint across its seven-country jurisdiction in preparation for future growth. By Munesu Shoko . Scania’s service footprint takes priority

Munesu Shoko [MS]: We have just come to the end of yet another difficult year economically. How did the economic situation impact the truck industry? Raimo Lehtiö [RL]: From a total volumes point of view, 2018 was actually a little bit better than expected. We expected the market to slightly dip compared with 2017, but surprisingly it recorded some growth, in the 7% region. The reason might be the fact that in 2017 several customers de-fleeted to reduce the sizes of their fleets in response to the tough business conditions at the time. Then in 2018 there was an unexpected slight market resurgence, which forced truck owners to purchase new

trucks. They were also not expecting that kind of uptick. However, from a supplier point of view, price levels were quite depressed due to currency fluctuations. From a Scania perspective, we had a challenging year due to the lack of enough vehicles in stock. This is due to the high demand we experienced in other markets, for example, in Europe. Consequently, the factory was under pressure during the first and second quarters of 2018. If it wasn’t for the shortage of vehicles, we could have easily sold in excess of 300 vehicles more during the second quarter. MS: With the 2018 total sales volumes set to slightly surpass 2017 figures, from a Scania

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