Escorts to launch heavy duty tractors from 2015

New Delhi: Escorts Ltd, one of the oldest manufacturers of agriculture and infrastructure equipment, has said the company will focus on premium tractors. To start with, it plans to launch a premium tractor in 2015.

Code named IVR3, this would be one of its kind tractor, which the company says will be an agriculture-solution with a mix of software technology and machineries. This will be a heavy duty tractor with 55 brake horse-power and above.

“In the last two-three years, lot of work has happened on what kind of technology we can bring in around the crop that we sow and seeds which have been growing across the country,” Nikhil Nanda, Joint Managing Director, Escorts, told Business Line.

The company is in talks with around 12-15 global companies (mostly from the European region) for technology collaborations. There are a few pilot projects or experiments already going on with some of these companies in southern India and the results have been good, he said.

“We are talking about solutions for the whole agriculture means – from the time of sowing the seeds to harvest – end-to-end solutions in terms of bringing the value to the farmers,” Nanda said.

Premium products
For example, he said, there are such technologies in Korea where if there is a need of 100 litres of water to irrigate a field, such machines are making it possible to use only 20 litres of water. Therefore, such technologies would help Indian farmers, especially in drought-hit areas or where there is scarcity of water for irrigation.

However, these premium tractors would be expensive than what are available in the market today, he said adding that price has to be high because these will be high-end products just like BMWs, Audis and Ferrari’s of the cars market.

“We will not be called as a tractor manufacturing company, but an agriculture solutions company in the future with these premium products,” he said.

Escorts has more than 45 variants of tractors starting from 25 to 80 horse power. It currently sells three brands of tractors – Powertrac (priced at Rs 3.75-6.5 lakh), Farmtrac (priced at Rs 4.5-8 lakh) and Escort (in limited States) priced around Rs 3 lakh.