Dear Shareholders,

I am pleased to present Escorts’ Annual Report for the year 2012-14 and am happy to share that the period was an eventful one marked by significant milestones, creditable performance and all-round holistic growth. Looking back at this incredible journey, I have come to realise that an entrenched entrepreneurial spirit driven by the urge to innovate has fuelled every step of this journey.

The zeal to do things differently is anchored on the foundations of Escorts fulfilling a responsible role in nationbuilding by contributing to hunger and poverty eradication through world-class technology and infrastructure solutions. These overarching initiatives drove a new energy through our enterprise, enabling us to focus on our pillars of technology and customer focus.

Aligning corporate priority with the nation’s most critical needs, we reinforced our commitment to our vision – that of emerging as an integrated provider of crop products and solutions to farmers and become one of the top engineering companies of India. Towards widening the reach of this overarching message that inspires one to embrace radical change, we made a small ‘move’ to trigger the transformation of the organisation and the country and turn it into a ‘movement’.

The 2020 product development initiatives that we have commenced across all our businesses are a pledge to delight our customers towards helping them be more productive. We are also working with global companies of international repute to harness emerging future technologies and information. In effect, with every move, we are meeting a new tomorrow. I am pleased to state that we received an encouraging response from our stakeholder community – employees, dealers, customers and financial partners – and expect the returns from this initiative to translate into better results over the foreseeable future.

The performance of Escorts during the period (2012-14) reiterated our focus of staying true to our ethos of customer-centricity, innovation and operational excellence. This has driven us to launch new and specialised products both in India and across the matured markets of Europe, create compelling agro-economic solutions that boost yield and farm productivity, establish our formidable construction equipment product suite across important national projects and leverage the value of our railway and auto products portfolio to tap a larger bouquet of marquee clients.

Going forward, Escorts will focus on creating specific, customer-focused product strategies that will be driven by what our customers actually want from us. All our efforts will be committed towards significantly improving capital returns and drive wealth creation for our customers.

Specifically across our businesses, we will continue to engage in operational restructuring, headcount reduction, prudent outsourcing, portfolio enrichment and value-addition. The complement of these initiatives is expected to enhance revenues, margins and profits with the objective to enhance value for all our stakeholders.

I am confident that our passion and hard work, coupled with our ability to embrace world-class technology and engineering excellence will help us rise against the odds and scale new peaks.

Best wishes,

Managing Director,
Escorts Limited