India's top carmaker, Maruti Udyog Ltd., is aiming at a sales of 1 million units in 2010, and sees its engineers developing cars independently to suit Indian consumers, its chairman said today.
Sales of passenger vehicles in India are forecast to nearly double to 2 million units per year by 2010. Maruti, 54.2 percent-owned by Suzuki Motor Corp., has nearly half the domestic market.
Maruti will expand its network of sales outlets and service workshops and launch five new models in the next five years to help reach its target, Shinzo Nakanishi said in a speech made available after the annual shareholders' meeting in New Delhi.
The company has 375 dealers and is adding 50 this year.
Maruti's engineers are also preparing for a bigger role.
"Suzuki Motor Corp. sees a major role for Maruti in the area of r&d for cars in Asia," Nakanishi said.
"The effort will be to empower Maruti to independently develop cars to suit preferences of Indian consumers," he said.
Some of the 220 engineers at Maruti's research and development center in India worked on the local variant of the Swift subcompact, which Maruti launched in India in 2005.
Maruti had "a very important role" in the recent alliance between Suzuki and Nissan Motor Co. Ltd., Nakanishi said. Nissan and Suzuki agreed in June to broaden their ties to include the use of each other's manufacturing facilities in emerging markets such as India.
Maruti is set to develop and build a compact car from 2008 for Nissan, mainly for export to Europe and to be sold locally.
"The increased scale of operations on account of the Nissan contract is likely to further improve cost and quality competitiveness," Nakanishi said.
Maruti's new plant in Manesar in Haryana state would begin operations "in the next few weeks", he said.
Maruti has said the plant will have an initial capacity of 100,000 cars, going up eventually to 300,000 units. Its existing plant in Gurgaon in Haryana has a capacity of 600,000 units.
Maruti's diesel engine plant will roll out 1.3-liter engines by year-end, as scheduled. It will have an initial capacity of 100,000 units.
