Centro Manufacturing Corporation (Centro) introduced four new products and revealed their bright prospects for the decade at this year’s iteration of the biennial Philippine International Motorshow (PIMS) that ran from October 24 to 28 at the World Trade Center in Pasay City.
Centro launched four advanced truck builds, all initially on Isuzu chassis, thereby emphasizing how far they’ve come after decades of establishing themselves as the go to builders for their trademark jeepney-type rear bodies, and also underscoring how it all started for them in the 1990s with their first major contract coming from Isuzu Philippines. CMC launched their 20-foot wing van body on a medium-duty Isuzu truck chassis, refrigerator vans built on Isuzu’s NLR light-duty truck and D-Max single-cab pickup truck chassis, and their build of the Isuzu QKR Class 2 modern PUV.
The new 20-foot wing van is a shorter, locally attuned version of the 32-footer that’s popular in Japan and which Centro and Isuzu launched last year. Different only in length, the new 20-footer retains the same lightweight aluminum panels and hydraulic roof actuators as on the longer wing van.
The light-duty and pickup truck refrigerated vans are built with improved insulated sandwich panels where aluminum composite sheets are made to cover extruded polystyrene insulation. They assert that compared to traditional injected polyurethane insulation, extruded polystyrene is less susceptible to water absorption, is more durable and is easier to maintain. Both refrigerator van body models can maintain cargo temperatures from minus 18 to plus 5 degrees Celsius. The light truck refrigerator van features a curbside sliding door that lets it have two separate internal compartments with potentially different functions–one as freezer the other as chiller, for example.
The wing van and refrigerator van bodies are built in partnership with Nippon Freuhauf of Japan which foresees the Philippines’ domestic logistics industry growing by 12.3 percent over the half-decade of 2015 to 2020. Nippon Freuhauf president Hiroyasu Hiruma said that both they and Centro are ready to support this growth, and offered an explanation for the types of truck builds that Centro introduced. He said that the current administration’s completion of the bridges to connect Luzon, the Visayas and Mindanao will push up the demand for overland transport using specialized dry- and cool-box cargo carriers such as wing and refrigerated vans.
Hiruma said that Nippon Freuhauf is so optimistic about Philippine prospects that on October 24, marking the first day of PIMS, they struck an agreement with Centro, committing to a joint venture to assemble refrigerator van bodies, and manufacture these bodies’ insulated sandwich panels, locally. Centro vice president for sales and marketing Rommel Juan disclosed that investment in the joint venture will start at PhP100 million in the first year, for construction of the manufacturing facilities, but that they expect capital infusions to reach a total of PhP 500 million in five years, after new products and plant capacities are brought online.
The fourth truck body build they introduced at PIMS 2018, the Isuzu QKR modern PUV implementation, represents even more new market opportunities for Centro. Centro’s Juan says: “It is a captive market with some 200,000 PUJs going to be upgraded during the next six years. And Centro is ready for it. We have on display at PIMS 2018 our version of the modern PUV Class 2, Gen 2 using the Isuzu QKR light truck platform to show for it.”