Hino boss says sales still strong

Speaking at a press luncheon in Melbourne, Hino Australia President and CEO Richard Emery gave us an insight into what Hino is up to for the rest of the year.

Asked what he thought of the truck sales situation for the first four months of the year, Mr Emery said even though sales weren’t as strong as the company’s record set in 2021, they’re still holding well.

“We finished at 5900 roughly last year; we’ll probably do around the same this year.” Mr Emery said. “Could we do more? Probably. If we had the supply, could get them landed and get them body-built. I suspect there is a glass ceiling in the Australian truck industry in terms of turning those chassis into trucks, because I don’t think anyone would be in the mood to invest heavily in new body-building facilities.

“So I think it’s going to sit around that number, but I don’t think it’s going to keep growing like it has for the last five years; it’s still a bloody good number but it’s not rampant like it was a few years ago.”

Asked what is in store for our market from a Hino perspective, Mr Emery said that the range was fairly stable except for the 500 Series, which needs to be updated for the new emission laws which will commence rolling out from November.

“We’re fairly stable with our models at the moment,” said Mr Emery.

“We’re kind of content at the moment. There’s a bit of frustration that we could probably do more if we had more but at the sort of volumes that we did last year and will do this year and will probably do next year, we’re kind of happy with that.”

Mr Emery said that due to the fact that the new emission laws will require a fair bit of work to be done on some of the trucks in the Hino lineup, the company is taking the opportunity rationalise its model ranges.

“In the transition between Euro 5 and Euro 6, because of all the work that needs to be done we’re also taking a rationalisation or a simplification of our model lineup. We’re going to pull out a lot of our models,” he said.

“It’ll mainly be in 300 Series and 500 Series; we’re actually adding models in the 700 Series. We’ll do that over the next year or so.

“We’ve looked at our model lineup and we’ve got around 220 or something like that. We’re going to pull that back to under 150. About 35 of those are manual gearboxes. The market is trending slowly toward auto so we’re going to pre-emptively pull some of those out…”

“We’ve done such a good job with Hybrid Electric, it’s up over 400 per cent last year, and now with the new laws, that vehicle is already at Euro 6 so it’s a great place to expand the range. You’ll see more of those,” Mr Emery said.

“I think we can recover the volume we lose through rationalisation with the examples from Hybrid Electric and 700 Series.

“I look at 300 Hybrid Electric, two years ago we were doing 50 a year, last year we did 200 with more on the order books. That should be in the mid-300s this year and 500 next year.

“We need to expand the offering on Hybrid Electric. It suits certain applications, so we’re building some prototypes now for certain applications, we’re building a council-type spec, some more Built to Go models, we think they’re a good basis for a tilt-tray – that’s another opportunity.

“We’re talking to them [HQ in Japan] about 700 Hybrid, which is available on the domestic market.

“We’ve said, ‘Well what do we need to do to convince you to open that truck up for Australia?’ There are a couple of segments where we think it would work well.

“We took some dealers and customers to the show in Japan last year and showed them the 700 Hybrid and there were a couple of times when the customers said they would be prepared to put one on as a trial.

“So we’re having the discussion with Hino Motors Limited to do a trial with a couple of them to see whether that’s viable.

“There are other opportunities with 700 Series in terms of chassis choice and wheelbase choice. It’s the one model where we will expand our offering,” Mr Emery said.

Asked how important the Australian market was to Head Office in Japan, Mr Emery was emphatic. “Very important,” he said. “Last year we were fourth [in global sales]. So, after the domestic market, we were the third most important market in the world… behind Thailand and Indonesia.

“So [we were] ahead of USA, ahead of a traditionally strong market like Taiwan, so yes – we’re important, but we’re complicated.

“Having said that, I came away from recent meetings there knowing that they’ll give us every support they can.”

So the future is looking solid for Hino Australia. A model rationalisation is probably needed and now is a good time do it.

Given the fact that they are the only truck company with an offering in the Hybrid space, it’s probably a good time to exploit that, and a 700 Series Hybrid Electric would be a very interesting exercise given that the Hybrid comparison we did with 300 Series returned fuel savings of better than 20 per cent.

We’re sure plenty of people will be watching.