Category: Industry

The Rs.20, 000 crore Indian Tyre Industry, is highly raw material intensive and predominantly a Cross Ply (or Bias) tyre manufacturing industry. It produces all categories of tyres, except Snow Tyres and Aero Tyre for which there is no demand domestically. Indian tyre industry is highly concentrated wherein 10 large manufacturers account for over 95% of the total tonnage production of 11.35 lakh M.T. On an average, 55% of the production is for replacement market, followed by 29.8% sold to OEMs directly and the remaining is exported.

Over the years, tyre manufacturers have developed a vast marketing network using dealers and depots and as such all types of tyres are now easily available even in the remotest corner of the country. No doubt, international auto majors in India now roll out their vehicles using Indian manufactured tyres.

Slowdown in automotive industry and global economic in general negatively impacted the Indian tyre industry in 2009. The industry tonnage growth was only 2.19% during first nine months of FY09, compared to 7.38% growth experienced during the same period last year. Demand side was also severely affected as almost all auto manufacturers were forced to adjust their production last year. A major relief for tyre manufacturers was provided by the government by reducing the excise duty on tyres from 14% to 10% in December 2008, and further to 8% in February 2009.

Increasing Cost of Raw Materials: Ram materials primarily comprise of natural rubber, crude and steel based materials which have historically experienced volatility in prices, especially during the last few months when price of domestic natural rubber increased almost 40%. Given the fact that raw materials constitute around 70% of the cost of production, combined with the manufacturers” inability to pass on the increased cost to their customers due to intense competition, rise in prices of these materials have a huge impact on profitability.

Increasing Radialization: Unlike in the developed countries, radialization has not yet reached its dominance in India. Particularly the truck, bus and LCV segments continue to be largely a cross ply based. Despite offering higher mileage, lower fuel consumption and improved safety, radial tyres have not yet caught on primarily because of poor road conditions and high initial cost which is approximately 25% higher than bias tyres. Moreover, the two important raw materials required for producing radial tyres (Steel Tyre Cord and Polyester Tyre Cord) are not manufactured domestically. Moving towards radialization will be vital if tyre producers want to protect their share in international markets. As of 2008, radialization as a percent of total production in passenger car tyres, LCV and heavy vehicles was 95%, 12% and 3% respectively.

Off the Road Tyres: Last year saw the top manufacturers, including CEAT and JK Tyres increasing their capacity of OTR (Off the Road) tyre production. OTR tyres are customized tyres and provide relatively higher margin. Increasing the proportion of OTR in the product mix is seen as a measure to improve profitability.

Increased Dumping: Besides material price fluctuations and lack of radialization, the industry is also suffering intense competition from low priced tyres from China and other South East Asian countries. Despite being of a better quality, Indian manufactured tyres loose ground when it comes to pricing. Moreover, slowing automotive demand from developed countries has made India a lucrative market for cheap tyres, thus resulting in increased dumping of cheap tyres from China.

Retreading: Another area of concern for the tyre manufacturers is the increasing retreading, where the worn out tread of the old tyre is replaced with a new tread. Retreading costs approximately 20% of a new tyre and is therefore gaining popularity, especially in Southern part of the country. Elgi Tyres and Tread Ltd are the two major retreaders in India. Significance of such retreaders can be gauged by the fact that around 85% of the tyre demand is for replacement.

Unresolved Tax Issue: The issue of inverted tax structure, wherein the import duty on natural rubber is 20% but import duty on finished tyres is as low as 10% still remains unaddressed. Operational inefficiency and taxation issues have being denting the competitiveness of Indian tyres.

Global Expansion: Several manufacturers are now moving global and are setting up manufacturing bases overseas. After acquiring Dunlop three years ago, Apollo Tyres recently acquired Vredetein Banden in Europe. JK Tyres acquired Tornel, a Mexican company last year to penetrate into American tyre market.

Despite these challenges, according to CARE Research, while the industry may register a tonnage growth of only 4.27% in FY09, the long term prospective seems to be bright. They expect the industry to experience a CAGR of approximately 8.21% between FY08 to FY13. Automotive companies have started experiencing increasing sales and raw material prices are stabilizing which will boost tyre sales over the coming months. However, experts suggest there will be some time lag before profitability picks up as tyre manufacturers are still carrying high cost inventories.

HOTEL LOYALTY
Hotels get nearly half of their revenues from the small segment of travelers who spend about a month each year on the road: frequent visitors make up only 10 percent of all hotel guests but account for 44 percent of
hotel nights . In the early 1980s, hotel chains began to recognize the value of such customers by introducing loyalty programs patterned on the airlines’ frequent-flier model. These programs have succeeded in maintaining the loyalty of people who travel moderately often but are not as effective as they might be with other segments, our research suggests.

The frequent-traveler segment represents $40 billion to $50 billion in revenues each year. These guests spend some of that money in their preferred hotel chains, but their wandering ways leave $22 billion to $27 billion in play. Persuading such people to narrow the field from three or more chains to their favorite two could add seven to ten nights at the chain they prefer. To capture this opportunity, hotel executives must ask, “What do you get the person who has everythingor at least more points than he or she can use?”
Part of the answer might involve changing the way points are redeemed. Even for elite-status members of a loyalty program, redeeming them for free hotel rooms can be cumbersome at popular times and destinations.

2.Loyalty Club Members Habitat
The percentage of all guests who indicated club membership is “very important” when selecting their most
recent hotel stay increased steadily throughout 2003 with a 25-percent annual increase.
Frequent travelers are four times more likely to consider club
membership very important when selecting a hotel.
Among frequent travelers, club members have considerably higher incomes, pay slightly more per room
night, stay more nights per year in hotels and are more tolerant of price increases compared with
nonmember hotel guests
The average profile of a frequent traveler who joins a loyalty program is a 47-year-old male traveling on
business. He stays 31 nights per year in hotels, is very brand loyal, pays an average of $103 per night and has an annual income of $104,000

E-CRM IN HOSPITALITY TODAY

Electronic customer relationship management (e-CRM), in the context of the exploding Internet distribution and marketing in hospitality, is a business strategy supported by Web technologies, allowing hoteliers to engage
customers in strong, personalized and mutually beneficial interactive relationships, increase conversions and sell more efficiently.

e-CRM cannot exist in isolation
Today’s multi-channel marketing model requires a single brand image to be communicated across all channels. In the same time it requires interactive customer relationships to be established and maintained across all
channels.

Anytime an Internet user lands on a hotel website, a branding interaction occurs. This branding interaction can
be positive or negative . Unfortunately for some hoteliers on many occasions a
visit to the hotel website turns out to be the last point of contact with this particular customer.
Two key questions are facing hoteliers today:
Who owns the customer in this new online environment? The online intermediary, which made the
booking, or the hotel where the guest stayed?
How can hoteliers establish mutually beneficial interactive relationships with the customers in order
to increase repeat business, boost revenues, and retain loyalty?
Here are the main aspects in e-CRM in hospitality:
1. Know Your Customer
2. Customer Service
3. Personalization
4. More Efficient Marketing
5.Building Customer Loyalty

1. KNOW YOUR CUSTOMER
Knowing your website visitors is an extremely important consideration when conceptualizing and designing your hotel website and your e-CRM strategy. After all, addressing your key audiences and providing them with relevant information is one of the key aspects of any hospitality site. Different customer segments should easily identify areas on the site that speak to them. Internet users visit a hotel website not as John Smith or Jane Smith, but as a Business Traveler, Meeting Planner, Special Event Planner, Family Traveler, Spa Services
Seeker, Golf Outing Seeker, Vacation Planner, Convention Attendee, Wedding Planner, etc.

Case Study: Who Are Your Online Customers?
The 2004 RUSH Report, a joint effort by Hospitality eBusiness Strategies and iPerceptions, based on nearly
40,000 customer survey respondents on 30 major brand hospitality websites, shows that 56 % of all visitors on
hotel branded websites are Leisure Travelers and 32% are Business Travelers. The benefits are obvious:
Identify your most valuable customers with best lifetime value perspective
Allows guest-centric data mining: guest history, guest profiles, past bookings, preferences, etc.
Enables informed decisions in real time
Allows fast response times
Real-time Guest Lifetime Value
Deliver business insight to executives, marketers, sales
2. PERSONALIZATION Personalization is more than providing the right information to the right person at the
right time. Personalizing the customer experience on the hotel website is a powerful conversion and retention
tool. Customizing your interaction with your most valuable customers will provide significant long-term rewards.
Adopt a policy on how to address your guests via email Addressing the customer segmentation issues on the property website is a logicalnext step. Creating a targeted email marketing campaign is another good step.

For the major hotel brands, the personalization efforts are much more complex and expensive. Customization tools used by some major brands and airlines allow website users to actively personalize their website experiences using over 250 criteria. Here are some of the efforts by the major travel and hospitality companies to make the user experience more personable:
Personalization agents using a variety of customization applications, capable of creating Behavioral
Profiles and a Real-time profile for each customer
Collaborative filtering: Using preference matrix and artificial intelligence to capture and predict
customer interests
Decision-support applications utilizing various applications for Behavioral Profiling, Predictive Modeling, Collaborative Filtering and Click-Stream Analysis, capable to sense the purchasing behavior and patterns of the user. By providing a customized booking experience these applications can boost the conversion rates.
2. CUSTOMER SUPPORT
It is important to understand that customer service is only one aspect of e-CRM and is primarily a reactive function aiming to improve performance and efficiency, while e-CRM as a whole is a proactive long-term strategy.
On the Internet the customer support aspect of e-CRM is an extremely important trust building and customer retention tool. A well positioned Contact Us or Help button or Push-to-talk feature speaks volumes about the
hotel brand and builds trust. 57% of online shoppers actively seek sites with good customer service

Case Study: e-CRM Comp Analysis of 9 major upscale hotel brands.
HeBS uses its proprietary CyberScore system to evaluate various aspects of 9 upscale hotel brands. HeBS addresses e-CRM features and functionalities considered essential for optimum customer experience, such as customer support, ease of use and visibility of customer support throughout the site, customer support by phone and email, personalization, “Self-service” Customer Service Tools , “Live” Customer Service Tools, corporate and property level help desks and contact info. Evaluated were a total of 9 e-CRM features. The maximum score is 90

Live Service Tools: Push-to-talk functionality and real-time interaction with live agent; instant messaging and chat-room type of assistance; Voice-over-Internet Protocols (VOIP) applications; automation to pre-screen live
support (selective approach) E-Mal Service Tools: Inbound e-mail management; automated e-mail response systems, capable of
automating 80%-90% of e-mail volume with 98% accuracy, and dramatically improving service and reducing support staff by up to 40%.

4. MORE EFFICIENT MARKETING
eMarketing plays a crucial role in establishing interactive relationships with your customers. eMarketing is a
marketing strategy that uses the Internet as its medium.
The main issues facing eMarketers in hospitality today are:
Guest profiling and one-to-one marketing.
Accurate segmentation: focused segmentation equals higher response rates
Create narrow-focused marketing campaigns
Utilizing lifestyle data and personal preferences in the marketing
Building opt-in email lists and precision e-Mail marketing (fivefold higher response rates)
Internal benchmark of customer lifetime value
Cross-selling opportunities
Campaign tracking and ROI analysis
Developing a robust and effective eMarketing strategy requires not only an extensive knowledge of your
customers and precise customer segmentation, shifting marketing finds from offline to online channels, but
deciding what your marketing objectives are.
Display Ads (e.g. Traditional Banners): Steady decline: 2003: 21% (as percentage of total online
advertising spend); 2002: 29%; 2001: 36%; 2000:50% (PWC/IAB). Click-through rate 0.83% in
Feb 2003 (eMarketer)
Keyword Search (e.g. PPC, paid-inclusion, etc): Steady increase: 2003: 35%; 2002: 15%; 2001:
4%; 2000: 1%.

Classifieds: increased usage of this format: 2003: 17%; 2002: 15%; 2001: 16%; 2000:7%.
e-Mail Marketing: Currently between 3%-4% of total spend; Jupiter Research reports that US email
marketing spending will rise from $2.1 billion in 2003 to $6.1 billion in 2008.

Overall Site Satisfaction: How would you rate your website experience overall?
Excellent 18.80%
Very good 35.73%
Good 28.94%
Fair 12.22%
Poor 4.31%
Total: 100%
Different customer segments perceive the hotel website differently. While not dramatically different, Business Travelers appeared slightly more critical than other user groups. Even when they felt satisfied, Business Travelers
appeared more critical: 54.57% found the site to be Very good or excellent compared to 55.14% for LeisureTravelers.

Conclusion: e-CRM is an integral part of online distribution and marketing in hospitality. The Internet provides the best direct means to reach existing and potential customers. Establishing interactive relationships with your
customers, which is the essence of e-CRM, will help you retain your customers, increase revenues, and build brand loyalty.

To know more about HOSPITALITY INDUSTRY check out ITC Infotech Website

http://www.itcinfotech.com

Travel Industry, Hospitality Industry, ITC Infotech, loyalty program,

The freight shipping industry has been on a fantastic ride for the last few years. The volume of shipments has increased exponentially and the number of freight forwarders and shipping providers has increased dramatically in order to keep up with demand. Although the freight shipping industry was impacted by the global recession in 2008 with many companies facing bankruptcy or going into receivership, overall the industry has remained bullish. The reason for the strength of the industry is simple businesses and individuals will always need to have their goods and products shipped to their customers.

Since the global marketplace has opened up drastically worldwide, it is now possible for consumers to shop twenty-four hours a day and for e-tailers to remain open in order to meet that demand. Naturally, with constant business being transacted, it means that freight shipping providers will always have work. The biggest problem currently facing the freight forwarders of the world is how to sustain the level of growth that they have been experiencing. It may not seem like a very complex issue, but it is, in fact, one of the most important that the shipping industry must resolve. The worlds shipping needs are currently being met because the infrastructure needed to sustain it is already in place. The problem arises from the fact that the current infrastructure is being used almost to capacity. If the freight shipping industry wants to continue expanding, it will have to begin creating new infrastructure to support the increase.

Now, creating the infrastructure requires financing something that the freight shipping companies may lack, and governments might not see the need to invest in building new ports, airports, railways and highways if they cannot see an immediate financial return from doing so. However, even if the governments from around the world were able to commit to building the needed infrastructure to allow the freight shipping industry to continue expanding, the creation of these new ports and airports will take time. The time needed to build the necessary infrastructure will, inevitably, have an impact on the speed of growth that the freight shipping industry is experiencing.

So, while it is true that the freight shipping sector can continue to expand for the foreseeable future, the long range forecast is far from clear. What is definitely clear is that the industry will have to begin investing in its future and also in finding ways to mitigate the eventual slowdown that all industry analysts know is coming.

The other very important point of consideration when it comes to the freight shipping industry is its negative environmental footprint. Engineers working for the shipping industry have been working on creating more powerful, more efficient engines for their sea and air carriers and they have also been working on ways of eliminating waste from their business model. However, the progress in this area is limited and still needs a lot of research and development to produce significant results. At least the reduction of the freight shipping industry footprint is on the agenda and being worked on diligently.

The amount of humidity in the air can have a good deal to do with how we feel and also effect the machinery we are using every day, especially the sensitive computers, visual and photographical equipment and many business operations and machines to name a few. The humidity is the amount of water vapour in the air, measured by dew point meters and humidity meters.

If the temperature drops below the freezing point, it can cause changes in how the linear motion and seals operate in machinery, especially within motion picture cameras and sensors, by increasing the formation of ice or vapour within the operating systems. This can result in the shutdown or failure of the circuit boards or control panels.

HVAC systems are another place where it is important to measure humidity in order to keep the cooling systems of buildings in working order and not burn out the compressors or motors of the units. By recording and keeping track of the humidity, the controls can be adjusted to compensate for the changes in the humidity and keep the HVAC units operating correctly.

The reason these transmitters are so important is that many of the food, pharmaceuticals, and computer chip manufacturers use them to keep track of the water vapour in the air or food. The latest technology of these sensors uses computer chips to measure over 2000 different values of the humidity in the environment and other factors that could influence the production of the foods, medicine or industrial products.

The meters are used in areas where it is important to identify the amount of water vapour that enters into a part of the manufacturing process, such as using compressed dry air or gaseous mixtures to manufacture the components of seals used in various linear motion devices.

A dew point meter gives an up to date continuous recording of the dew point temperature of a selected target or target area. The dew point meter can be used to record the temperature of gasoline while it is being pumped into the automobile. The variety of dew point meters are all engineered to be utilized in different areas of whichever manufacturing process is required.

One fact to remember when using humidity and dew point meters is that the higher the outside temperature or the temperature of the room the more water vapor will be inside the room or picked up by the meters.

The relative humidity is measured by RH units and that varies with the air or gaseous medium being measured. When combined with the monitors of a computer program, the meters can keep track of a very narrow range of data. This data is usually used in technology that requires very delicate and limited ranges of tolerance in the air or gaseous quality; for example as regulating the water vapor as parts per hundred, million or even billion.

The use of both types of measuring systems is useful in determining if there is dangerous weather in the next few days. As the outside temperature rises, the amount of water vapor can contribute to the chance of tornados developing. This is useful when considering the weather forecast that would be in place when the space shuttle lifts off, for example.

In addition to the technology uses, they are used to measure humidity in the air in the world famous museums, to protect and preserve priceless artifacts from damage. Photographic collections can also be affected by the increases in humidity. Photographers use the instruments to also keep their equipment safe, as the condensation of the interior of an expensive camera can be costly.

Vital issues in the hair salon industry contain a number of factors such as the types of services that a beauty salon may offer to its clientele. Beauty services can include everything from cuts, to styling, to coloring, to extensions, just to name a few. The more services a salon is able to offer, the more marketable it will make itself to the public.

In order to be able to bring in as many customers as possible and to be able to connect with as many members of the community as possible it is recommended to hire a staff that can cater to the needs of people of all different ethnic backgrounds. Different ethnic groups have different needs when it comes to beauty services, and this should always be considered when new staff members are being interviewed and hired.

Suburban and urban locations are generally much better places to promote a beauty shop, and this also makes it much easier to stay aware of the latest trends in the business. It is also important to remember that the business itself should be easily found within the local area. Many clients may shy away from visiting a business that is difficult for them to find.

An additional way to stay informed of the latest and best products is to make sure that at least a couple of staff members are able to attend promotional events or conventions at least every other month or so. These conventions give people in the industry an opportunity to sample and learn about the newest products on the market.

It is also important to make sure that the prices that clients are being charged for a different beauty services fall within a reasonable price range for the industry. Even though it is everyone’s goal to make money and turn a profit, it is still important to remember that customers may feel tempted to seek services at a different business if they feel that they are being overcharged. A simple way to prevent this may be to research the prices of beauty shops located around the local area.

All employees that are hired to work in the hair world should be qualified with the latest credentials. It is a matter of safety and quality to make sure that all employees are highly qualified to perform the services that they claim to be able to perform.

One of the latest, easiest, and most cost-efficient ways to promote a business in this industry is through the use of social media and social networking sites. It usually costs nothing to establish these sites, and they can be updated multiple times per hour if someone would choose to do so. No business in this industry should also be operating without a well organized web page on the Internet.

Vital issues in the hair salon industry also include making sure to offer services using hypoallergenic products for customers who may need them. In today’s age of allergies and allergic reactions this is an easy way to maximize the potential for one’s business. Advertising the use of hypoallergenic products is an easy way to draw in extra customers that may otherwise not feel inclined to make use of someone’s business.