A study of AVS drive market; Crompton Greaves Limited, Calcutta

Abstract

Crompton Greaves, a reputed player in electrical industrial equipment market, is involved in manufacturing motors, transformer and HT & LT switchgear. It is also in consumer appliances market and as well as computers & FAX market. It’s major part of the turnover is contributed by the industrial equipments. It has several production units located in Bombay and Ahmednagar. It has several marketing offices all over the country. In 1993, the company had gone into collaboration with POWERTEC (USA) for manufacturing variable speed drive with brushless DC motor. The rotor of the motor being a permanent magnet and for several other costly components like built-in digital encoder the product becomes a high price product. Though the product is superior to any other drive and motor available in the market but till now it has not been able to capture even a small portion of variable speed drive market. Since the product has some advanced features; it is called ‘Advanced Variable Speed’ drive (AVS drive). This study was conducted to find out the reasons of its low penetration in the market and to look into several other objectives. The other main objectives were to (a) check awareness of the product and try to generate awareness of the AVS drive among the variable speed drive users. b) most favourable feature among the several features to a particular industry. (c) sales potential in/around Calcutta. The study shows that the reasons of the low penetration of the product are (a) the product is a package offer, thus it is a costly offer. (b) the package includes a motor, thus customer who is having a motor - his motor gets obsolete. (c) only source of the product is Crompton Greaves and product is not compatible with any other motor available in the market. While checking awareness level it was found that only 3 out of 20 samples were well aware of the product. Though 2 of them were consultants and 1 was user of AVS drive. Among the several features of the product most popular feature is wide speed range followed by speed accuracy. There is a distinct difference of choices across the industries. Company can easily tap segment which prefers speed accuracy but tapping the segment which prefers wide speed range only may not be very easy, because there are several cheap competitive products which offer wide speed range. To discuss about sales potential the data collected from field does not show tho real picture. From the percentage point of view it shows 25% ( 4 out of 20) of the respondents were very kin to buy the product. But, in actual practice the figure may be lower than 25%. Because the factors influencing buying