Interview with Carles Guitart, director of sales for workshops Tort

It is true that in our case specifically, just before the harvest, it is a good time for sales, but the overall picture of the sector still see so very complicated, as in the past two years.

Turnover in particular, and not to work for machinery used, but new can continue pulling. The farmer needing a piece on a mandatory basis has to end up buying the piece, either in origin or us as a specialized workshop. And at a time where there are economic difficulties, the farmer invests more in repair machinery is already and not in new equipment. Therefore, each time we reach the user more concave, more screens and more spare parts to fix that in other cases had been replaced by a new machine.

Basically that the piece that we supply you can mount perfectly on your machine, because us only thing we do is to copy ' fielmente´, even improved them in some cases, but it has to make sure that the piece has the same quality or higher than the origin. And all this clearly to a much more competitive price, sometimes almost 50% less than the price of an original piece.

This is the factor not just dominate, as we work mainly on request. Each farmer has his hobbies and particularities and wants some pieces almost tailor-made. That is precisely one of the advantages that we can offer the customer everything you need, providing it with pieces that cannot be achieved in origin. Sometimes, the size of production or the own grain to pick up, you need a type of specific piece and here is where we as a specialized workshop can make him those specific parts at the same price as a standard.

Every year, around the world wakes up at the last minute and up to 15 days or one month before the start of the campaign the majority of farmers does not begin to revise their machines. Then, all start to pieces. This makes sometimes even very difficult to serve the pieces in time.

The pieces that are standard and we know for sure they will be sold are the only ones we have in stock, as well as those that are known that they can break in full campaign: pickers, crankshafts or cylinders. Why them can be served one day to another.

There are two types of pieces that are that usually invigorate. On the one hand, which have to be replaced by wear, such as cylinder rods, concave or sieve, and which are usually the farmer buys after reviewing the machine just before the start of the campaign. On the other hand, are the pieces that change for breakage during the campaign itself, such as the crankshafts, pickers, conveyors and axes.

Brands tend to manufacture spare parts more complicated and made into specific moulds, so many pieces of new equipment or try to copy them, because that is of itself of pieces of low-cost for whose production should make specific matrices and molds. As well, however, 80% of the pieces can continue producing them, and all this at half price.

It is more complicated that you can retrieve parts of China or other Asian countries with cheap labor, because there are so many models and spare parts that cannot be a planning of what will be spent more or less on each campaign. Each brand has hundreds of models, and each year are changed and until the following year may not have that spare. The impossibility of planning, together with the factor of the speed with which is necessary to serve a piece, especially if it breaks in the middle of a campaign, makes very difficult the entry of foreign competition in the market of spare parts.

We will work more and more, there will be fewer farmers and fewer machines, and those who remain will be specialists. Machines will be best, wear will be less and less, spare parts estropearán less, and we will end up working primarily, and in much smaller amounts, with basic parts of wear.