How customer-focus, customisation made ACI Motors a powerhouse

A customer-needs driven business model with strong focus on after sale services and customisation has seen ACI Motors make more in a month than its competitors can in a year. 

The ACI Ltd subsidiary, ACI Motors, a Bangladeshi distributor of global brands, started small in 2007 with farm mechanisation product Sonalika Tractor before expanding into many other segments to grow its annual turnover to around a quarter billion US dollars. 

A knack for quality venturing helped expand its footprint into automobiles and automotive, construction, power equipment and musical instruments, water pump and some others while the company is continuously introducing new agro machineries to revolutionise local farming. 

Following the tie ups with the world's strongest brands, most of the ACI Motors' business units are now leading the market. 

ACI Motors Executive Director (ED) Subrata Ranjan Das, in an exclusive interview with The Business Standard recently, shared how the company made such a large footprint in a short time. 

"We take pride in the quality and impact of our businesses for mobility and speed," said Das, an agricultural engineer now leading the ACI Motors team of over a thousand people. 

Maximum customer focus ensures the best product and service, tie ups with strong global brands, tailouring products and services to best suit the local reality, and the talents within the team are the keys behind this unique competency in each of the company's business verticals, he said. 

"Give us any global brand that the local market needs and we would at least triple its sales," he declares, his confidence brimming due to the track record.

Subrata's confidence also stems from the company's focus on customisation, which matters a lot for the Bangladeshi market, according to him.

For instance, the local farmlands to be cultivated are small and too muddy. Keeping this in mind, the ACI reduced their Sonalika Tractor's and power tillers' turning radius alongside strengthening them to plough the muddy grounds. 

Also the farmers benefit a lot as their land is ploughed in one-tenth the time, at one-third the cost and most importantly the land can be prepared much better for cultivation. 

These are why around one-third of Bangladeshi farmland is cultivated by ACI's agro machineries and the company is serving around half of the annual formal market for agro machineries.  

Sonalika Tractor users also get service in any point of the country within six hours and that is one of the reasons why the brand is leading the market. 

Leveraging its market leadership position in the country's farm mechanisation, it entered the motorcycle business. 

Japanese Yamaha in 2017 tied up with ACI Motors through giving it the distributorship, replacing its 40 years partner. 

"We are now making the previous dealer's annual sales in a month, and we already have emerged as the market leader in the 150 cc motorcycles segment." 

Furthermore, Yamaha, for the first time in its long global history, handed over its manufacturing technology to a distributor company and ACI Motors is running its local Yamaha factory with an annual capacity of 1 lakh units. 

"We picked the quality of Yamaha motorcycles and ran the business here in the ACI Motors way. 52% of the Yamaha riders come back to our service centres even after the warranty period ends and Yamaha said this is their global highest rate of customer retention." 

The brand is giving its other products - such as musical instruments, engines-  to us to officially sell in the country, he added.

At the two wheeler manufacturing plant, robot welding would yield over 2% error, which the ACI Motors team has brought down to around 0.5% despite manual welding by humans.  

The most sophisticated machines needed for servicing modern Yamaha bikes are given for free to all the Bangladeshi dealers, regardless if they are in big cities or in rural areas. ACI invests in it for the quality of the services across the country. 

Chinese Foton, the world's top commercial vehicle brand by volume, tied up with ACI Motors after trying four local players over a decade and ACI Motors is selling more Foton a year than what the previous four distributors together did in over a decade. 

In fact, ACI Motors won three of the five Foton global awards last year due to its excellence as a distributor.

The success is attributed to ACI Motor's care for its customers, said Subrata Ranjan Das. 

"Unlike some other local distributors, our team guarantees the Foton commercial vehicle owners that the vehicle would not deprive them of revenue due to parts shortage, technical breakdown."

The same holds true about the industrial generator customers. The parliament building and two-thirds of the metro rail stations are ACI Motors' generator customers. 

In Bangladesh, most of the global brands' after sale services had proven insufficient, but by ensuring its quality ACI Motors has demonstrated their worth to an increasing number of global brands, said its ED. 

A Sonalika buyer can own the tractors at 20% down payment and if they maintain the unit, the first 18 months are enough to recoup the price of the tractor price, whose lifespan is 10 years.  

The company has also introduced rice harvesters and transplanters from Yanmar – a global giant in agro machineries- and users know how their yield improves. 

"We became the largest export destination of Yanmar in the world in the agri- machinery sector within two years of operation though the company is 120-years-old," Subata said. 

He believes farm mechanisation has a big role to play in the coming years as the country needs efficient agriculture while farm labour shortage already has emerged as a concern. 

"Bangladesh uses less than 2 kilowatts of mechanical power per hectare of farmland, which is over 10 in China and over 20 in Japan. So, the revolution is yet to come."

Over 13% rice was wasted due to manual harvesting, almost the entire of which could be saved using combined harvesters. 

On the other hand, rice transplanter boosts yield by double digits and also helps early ripening of paddy which is crucial for the haor area. 

ACI Motors is currently also working on mechanisation of other crops and dairy farming. 

"With our product and services we helped grow thousands of entrepreneurs across the country, who are contributing a lot to the national economy," he said, adding that the company would be gradually expanding its local manufacturing portfolio that already includes two-wheeler manufacturing and agro machineries.