Comments
Bajaj Auto is staying away from the car business.
Mr Carlos Ghosn, Chief of Renault and Nissan, in association with whom the company was to have developed the small car, has agreed to re-orient the project toward a four-wheeler, said Mr Rajiv Bajaj, Managing Director, Bajaj Auto.
The four-wheeler will be made at BAL's Aurangabad plant to keep costs down. The new platform, which will have both commercial and passenger applications, will be showcased to the joint venture partners, Renault-Nissan, in January 2012.
“Hopefully they will like what they see. They are at liberty to say we like it, or turn up their nose,” Mr Bajaj said.
According to the agreement, Bajaj will take care of distribution of the commercial application, while Renault-Nissan will be responsible for the personal transportation application.
Earlier, addressing shareholders at the 4th AGM here, Mr Bajaj said that the company was not interested in the car business.
“We are staying away from the car business,” he said. Later he told reporters that till 2009, the company had planned to come out with a car similar to the Nano.
“In November 2009 we thought this project was not viable and moved away,” he said adding that Mr Ghosn agreed then to reorient the project towards a four-wheeler.
Launch in overseas markets first
Stating that the project was at the prototype stage, Mr Bajaj said that the new four-wheeler will be launched in overseas markets such as Sri Lanka and Bangladesh before being introduced in the Indian market, and subsequently in all global markets.
Explaining the strategy, Mr Bajaj said, “A lot of customers will come from the three-wheeler space.”
The company did not want to be faced with a situation where people stopped buying the three-wheeler and there were not enough four-wheelers, he said adding that BAL will prefer to put it in a market which had a smaller slice of three-wheeler sales.
To begin with, BAL is expanding installed capacity at Aurangabad plant from 45,000 units a month to 60,000 units.
Comments
COMMENT NOW
Comments
Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.
We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of TheHindu Businessline and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.