Singapore-based construction equipment company LeeBoy marked its domestic entry on Wednesday by launching its first locally designed-and-manufactured motor grader.

This is the fifth largest market at $4 billion (around Rs 18,000 crore) and tipped to treble in five years, said Mr Kamal Bali, President and CEO of LeeBoy India Construction Equipment P Ltd.

The subsidiary of Singapore's ST Kinetics was setting up a 60-strong facility with an investment of $35 million (around Rs 150 crore) at Jigani near Bangalore to build a range of road construction and maintenance equipment to excavators and off-road dump trucks.

In a market dominated by CE majors (BEML, Komatsu, Caterpillar, Volvo and Hitachi) LeeBoy's USP was its package of an ORM, he said. An operator-driver-technician-spares manager would be offered with each vehicle to take care of repair and maintenance.

“In the last one year we noticed that this [maintenance and repairs] was the biggest pain point” for customers, Mr Bali said. Starting January 2012, rural candidates would be trained as operators at the proposed training centre.

Roads and highways sector was the primary target besides ports and power projects. In the next five years, when the infrastructure sector would need to spend $800 billion, only 50 per cent would have been spent. Even in national highway programmes such as the Golden Quadrilateral, “We would still have 30,000 km to go.”

In the next six to eight months, LeeBoy India would launch crawler excavator, backhoe loader, products from the US arm such as road pavers, curbers and pot-hole patchers.

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