ET Now: Firstly, congratulations on a strong quarter. If you can take us through the highlights of the quarter in the year gone by?
N Muthukumar: As you have seen the financial results for the last quarter, we have done comparatively well and we started moving up.
The market is looking good. Whatever internal action that we took in the last two years when the market was down, started yielding the results. But there is still a long way to go.
ET Now: What has been a demand trend that you have noticed from your key clientele, particularly domestically?
N Muthukumar: If you seen our domestic customers' demand, particularly in medium and heavy commercial vehicle, have been strong in the last quarter and continues to be good in the current quarter also.
Our internal improvements also helped us to improve our operating margin and the efficiency of conversion with higher volume has really helped us improve our bottom line.
ET Now: What has been the key reason for the strong operational growth?
N Muthukumar: The basic thing is – in the last two years of downtrend, lot of efficiency improvement, lot of supply chain reorganisation has been done to ensure that the supply chain is agile to take care of the current market volatility.
The number of new products that we introduced in the last two years have been tremendous and more than 22% of our revenue has come from the new product which has resulted in substantial improvement in our penetration into the market.
Our shares have gone up, share of business with all the customers and those penetrations have helped us.
ET Now: Let us talk about the trend in commodity prices. Given that we have seen a downtick, what is the expectation on your margins going forward?
N Muthukumar: See whatever the commodity prices going down, I think we have a very clear back to back with the customers and anything going down on the commodity is not going to have an impact at this point of time for our bottom line.
ET Now: How is the margin trajectory looking given the current trend of commodity prices and if you can also talk about the export, how the export market has been and which countries as well as clients have been the key drivers on that front?
N Muthukumar: As far as exports are concerned, we have remained flat in the last two years and also in the last quarter. We mainly export to Europe and North America.
While we are trying to explore other business and other markets, at this point of time, our focus is on North America and Europe.
Europe is slightly flat and showing slight recovery, North America was very strong and but showed a slight dip in the last quarter. However, we are confident that we will be able to maintain our export growth.