Tank-Weld To Distribute Shacman Trucks in Jamaica and Caribbean as Sole Dealer

For three years, Tank-Weld Equipment had been taking note of the hardy trucks used by large contractor China Harbour Engineering Company, CHEC, before finally decided to put the vehicle to a test.

Tank-Weld reached out to Shacman trucks in China, and that outreach led to negotiations with the automaker, culminating in a deal that sees the construction equipment firm diversifying into a new business line as exclusive dealer of Shacman trucks.

The arrangement began January 1.

"Yes, we're bringing in the same Shacman trucks that the Chinese have been using for the last three years," Managing Director of Tank-Weld Equipment John Ralston confirmed to the Financial Gleaner.

"We sold a piece of property to CHEC and they moved in beside us, and we've been watching their fleet for the last three years. We decided to get in touch with Shacman to buy one of those trucks for a test," Ralston said, relating the preliminary development.

Brutal tests

Out of those discussion, Ralston said Tank-Weld ended up with five units that were put through brutal tests over a three-month period.

"When we brought them in, we accelerated the test period over a short space of time. They were running up to three trips per day from Rio Bueno to Kingston and back with loads," he said.

The Tank-Weld Group operates plants in both Rio Bueno, Trelawny, and Kingston.

Tank-Weld Equipment is an associate company of the group, established in 1973. It maintains all the equipment used in Tank-Weld Group's operations, rents equipment and handles special projects such as crane work and pile driving.

In December, Tank-Weld representatives travelled to China, where they signed with Shacman as exclusive dealer in Jamaica and the rest of the Caribbean. The company also intends to replace its current fleet with Shacman units on a phased basis.

For close to 40 years, Tank-Weld has been using American-made Mack trucks, supplied by Kingston Industrial Agencies. But Ralston said that while the company had been well-served by its fleet of 114 Mack trucks, their advanced technology and increasing sophistication required specialised training to maintain them, for which the talent was scarce.

"We've been having more and more problems keeping them on the road. The truth is that they've become highly electronic with computers and sensors and so on, and the problem with Jamaica is that as soon as you train up a mechanic, he goes off to Canada or the USA. It was therefore getting harder and harder to keep our fleet on the road," Ralston said.

The company intends to sell off the Mack fleet eventually, he said.

To accommodate the Shacman truck dealership, Tank-Weld is repurposing its five-acre maintenance yard at Six Miles in Kingston. Neither the investment in the dealership nor the terms of the arrangement with Shacman were disclosed.

"The amount of trucks that we have coming in is not cheap by any measure, but as regards the total investment I'd rather not say at this time, except to say that it is substantial," he said.

Building a showroom

Ralston says the company is building a showroom and parts depot and hiring the required sales and administrative staff, ahead of a formal roll-out of the new operation in May.

Tank-Weld has 58 trucks on order, of which just over 20 are already sold. The units take around 110 days to arrive at the Jamaican port, dating from the placement of the order.

The name Shacman is an amalgam of three others: 'Sha' comes from the first three letters of the province in which the trucks are made, Shaanxi; the 'c' stands for Cummins, the legendary American diesel engine that powers a large range of trucks and equipment worldwide - the Chinese are now making that engine through a 50/50 partnership; and 'man' in homage to the German-made truck called MAN.

Ralston says the Chinese basically went shopping when they decided to build trucks.

"When China decided to up their game and make their name a little bit better regarding performance and quality, instead of reinventing the wheel, they went to Germany and negotiated with MAN and bought the entire contents of the factory, since that company was exiting that level of technology," he said.

Internet searches reveal that the full range of Shacman vehicles spans the small five-ton box-body delivery trucks to a line of dump trucks, all the way up to tractor heads. Tank-Weld has partnered with JN Bank Limited to offer up to 90 per cent financing, repayable over seven years, Ralston said.

"They were looking for something to launch their commercial vehicle loans department, so ... they have partnered with us on the financial side of this business," he said. (www.chinatrucks.com)

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