Chennai, Jul 5 (IANS): Owing to change of corporate plans, concreting equipment major Schwing Stetter (India) has decided to expand into construction equipment machinery manufacturing and will start rolling out excavators at its upcoming Rs 230 crore new plant in Tamil Nadu, said a top company official.

He said the company will be rolling out excavators, motor graders and others apart from the concreting equipments from its new plant at Cheyyar in Tiruvannamalai district some time next year.

"Earlier group company China-headquartered XCMG Construction Machinery thought to investing directly to make construction equipment machinery while Schwing Stetter would focus on concreting equipments. But later the plans changed," Managing Director V.G. Sakthi Kumar told reporters here.

The Germany-based Schwing Stetter is now part of the Chinese XCMG group.

According to Kumar, the construction equipment machinery will be sold under XCMG brand while the concreting machines will be sold under the Schwing Stetter brand.

On Thursday, Schwing Stetter launched the XCMG crawler hydraulic excavator.

"The excavator market in India is growing. In 2018 24,833 units were sold up from 19,198 units sold in 2017. The river linking projects and other infrastructure projects would require large number of excavators," Kumar said.

Queried about the funds crunch faced by the non-banking finance companies (NBFC) largely financing the purchase of excavators, he said the NBFC woes will be over soon.

"We are also planning to partner with financial institutions to finance our machines," he added.

About the production schedule, he said that the company will first sell the imported XCMG machine range, then import completely knocked down (CKD) units to be assembled here and then start manufacturing the machines.

Kumar said the company is also developing its vendor base.