Our Board of Directors has defined last week the new LTOs for the coming years. In summary, we will focus our strategy on competitiveness and we also want to increase our presence in the Asian and Central-Asian market. We also underlined that our technology leadership is the key point of CLAAS strategy. Training and studies partnerships have always been a tradition for CLAAS and the BoD want intensify this sphere.
For sure, the most important CLASS’ LTO is the competitive position. Indeed, in order to stay competitive, CLAAS company stay always in motion, we continuously develop even better solutions for our customers. CLAAS don’t want to just follow trends; we produce what we consider to be the best and we want to maintain the quality of our innovative products as high as possible. We are driven by our high commitment to innovation and quality. Our customers have an entire trust in our products and this is our great advantage on our competitors but we don’t want to fail in their expectations. That is the reason why we didn’t renew contracts why our Chinese suppliers with whose we had some quality problems in the past year.
Quality and technology are our strengths. Since the last five years we became the technology leader in the agricultural field but the future is not assured and we have to maintain our R&D department efficiency. That is why we decided to increase our R&D budget from € 122.6 Million to €125 M for next year and planned creation a new R&D department in Mumbai (India) for 2015.
Future; we always keep future in mind. The Indian market is exponential; sales have increased of 47%! We have decided to open two new factories in the coming years, one more in Faridabad and one in Jaipur. This will allow us to increase our production capacity of 13% in five years. We also decided to create a school in Mumbai for training our future managers and engineers. The trend in China is still the same with a robust development; in this regard we are planning the