Sean Nero

ANSA Au­to­mo­tive's bold de­ci­sion to en­ter the CNG seg­ment of the au­to­mo­bile mar­ket 16 months ago has proven to be an ex­cel­lent in­vest­ment, says sec­tor head Jerome Bor­de.

In March 2015, the com­pa­ny in­tro­duced the Hon­da City CNG sedan just as the gov­ern­ment of Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar through the NGC/CNG com­pa­ny had em­barked on a de­lib­er­ate cam­paign to wean mo­torists off es­tab­lished forms of gaso­line.

Bor­de said: "With re­spect to the pub­lic's re­sponse to its CNG ve­hi­cles, we are very sur­prised by the pub­lic's re­sponse. We were very cau­tious when we were en­ter­ing it. We were pi­o­neers in the in­dus­try and we were thread­ing very cau­tious­ly, but I will tell you that NGC/CNG Com­pa­ny has done a phe­nom­e­nal job in ed­u­cat­ing the pub­lic. Peo­ple have done trans­ac­tion with us seam­less­ly. So we are very op­ti­mistic about where it is go­ing. We con­grat­u­late the CNG Com­pa­ny and we are a huge sup­port­er of that ini­tia­tive.

"We are look­ing for oth­er op­por­tu­ni­ties that we could bring to mar­ket be­cause peo­ple are ask­ing us. Peo­ple ac­cept ANSA Mo­tors is the op­tion and we are do­ing every­thing that we can to meet that ex­pec­ta­tion. We are very ex­cit­ed about what this in­dus­try of­fers."

He said de­spite the down­turn in the econ­o­my, there has been a jump in sales for the first six months of the year com­pared to the same pe­ri­od last year. Bor­de at­trib­uted this to the num­ber of op­er­a­tional ef­fi­cien­cies im­ple­ment­ed across the com­pa­ny.

"As a busi­ness, we have looked at ef­fi­cien­cy and cost con­trols and we have a heavy fo­cus on ser­vice pro­vid­ed. We con­tin­ue to look at more op­por­tu­ni­ties for en­hanc­ing the cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­ence and over the com­ing months we are go­ing to roll out some ini­tia­tives that will sat­is­fy what our cus­tomers have been ask­ing of us.

"Time is of the essence. Peo­ple want con­ve­nience. We have opened a lo­ca­tion in Ch­agua­nas. We are ren­o­vat­ing our op­er­a­tions and stream­lin­ing our busi­ness in south. We are do­ing some up­grades in To­ba­go.

"We are reach­ing out to our touch points of cus­tomers. We are al­so try­ing to get the turn­around time in what they want for con­ve­nience. Every con­ve­nience as­pect that they have point­ed out to us, we are deeply fo­cused on. That's the way we are go­ing to deal with it and it is al­ready pay­ing div­i­dends," he said.

"Our per­for­mance and our re­sults are bet­ter than we had last year. In dif­fi­cult times, cus­tomers are go­ing to want to see whether we re­spect and ap­pre­ci­ate their loy­al­ty and we have to stand the test of that. We are very con­fi­dent that we are in the right place and that we are do­ing the right things to meet what they are ask­ing."