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The year begins with good news for Marcopolo. For its 2020 sales performance, the company was recognized as Brand of the Year in Bus Body, Brand of the Year in Intercity Body and Brand of the Year in Urban Body at the 28th edition of the Lotus Award.
This was the first time that Marcopolo achieved recognition in three categories of the award, promoted by Editora Frota. We talked with Leandro Sodré, Marcopolo’s National Sales Manager, about the importance of the Lotus 2021 Award, the challenges of the last year and what we can expect in the coming months..
Lotus 2021 Award: understand the figures that justify this achievement
The Lótus Award is granted to manufacturers and distributors of commercial vehicles and is based on the Renavam licensing numbers informed by Fenabrave and calculated by Frota DataBank, the statistical branch of the publishing house.
According to the data compiled on commercial vehicles produced and licensed in the Brazilian market in 2020, Marcopolo is the leading brand of bus body, selling 4,654 units in the Brazilian market, representing 33.37% of market share. Of this total, the intercity sector represents 1,825 units, with a 54.76% share, and urban 2,829 units, with a 45.46% market share.
For Sodré, the triple victory in 2021 recognizes the strength of the sales team and the work for the development of a complete line of products. “We have from the eight-ton microbus to an electric articulated bus. This award is important to give notoriety to a company that is committed and has a vocation in all lines of transport and mobility as a whole”.
According to the executive, it is not only the figures that justify winning the Lotus 2021 Award. “We continually invest in technology for the entire product line. It is also an important recognition of the dedication of the entire team. We have a very engaged team committed to delivering competitive solutions”.
Marcopolo consolidates itself as the program’s largest supplier of the Caminhos da Escola [School Pathways] program. The buses help thousands of students from the municipal and state public basic education networks to get to their schools.
2020: ” A more challenging year than we could ever imagine”
Sodré closely followed all the changes brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. “The effects on mobility and public transport led the industry to a sharp drop in production and very low levels of passengers transported,” he says. For him, the “new normal” no longer exists and the industry needs to reinvent itself.
For this, the first step is to go through this entire condition, with positive advances in relation to the vaccine. Even so, for the executive, there is no going back to what we knew before: “The popularization of the home office and our new habits will impact the transportation sector, which needs to assimilate all of this. Then, operators and manufacturers need to find a new point of demand”.
Highlight for Marcopolo BioSafe
In an interview, Marcopolo’s national sales manager also highlighted the importance of information. With the advancement of COVID-19, the company dedicated itself to research to bring knowledge to users and operators. “Marcopolo as a whole needed to understand the situation in a very agile way in order to present solutions to the market. I never imagined that my work routine would include conversations with Infectious disease doctors, biomedical doctors and companies specialized in the disinfection of environments”.
That’s when the Marcopolo BioSafe platform of biosafety solutions arose. The goal was to show that buses can be a safe environment, reinforcing the already existing cleaning routines and intensifying the procedures with technology.
Leandro Sodré reinforces Marcopolo’s concern in developing solutions that can be applied to buses already in operation. “The addition of these items can be done in used models and, to do so, our customer can count on the support of the after-sales network. In addition, part of the production of vehicles already comes with some kind of protection, such as the alcohol gel dispenser or the UV-C system that disinfects toilets and air conditioning”.