The Tata Nano has set the pulse racing in the automotive industry. With the ever growing car market, all the major OEMs are looking at India with more focused eyes than ever before. The passenger car market has been experiencing a healthy growth year after year and the small car segment contributes heavily towards that growth.
The latest to come into the party has been General Motors. It has been a well known fact that the American giant has been doing all it can under the brand name of Chevrolet to push the image and respect which it never enjoyed at when it operated as Opel. Also, GM now wants to deliver heavily on the VFM aspect to lure in the prospective consumers and convert them into actual buyers. Strategies have been formed and Chevrolet has a service plan in place which offers a three year solution etc.
Now, to fuel the fire relating to small cars, David Reilly, President, GM Asia Pacific, said that GM is also evaluating options of developing a mini car which will roll out from its Talegaon plant. But what caught the fancy of everyone was the asking price of this mini car, that being about 2 lakh bucks! He remarked that GM could come out with a small car (smaller than Spark) in the next two years. He also added that GM would not be looking at competing with the Nano since it might affect their brand positioning. Chevrolet has been flaunting the Chevrolet Beat concept car, but the final product could very well be based on that.
Close to $300 million has been infused into the Talegaon plant which will be operational from August 2008 and will manufacture small cars. The installed capacity of the Talegaon plant will be 140,000 units so the total production will be 225,000 units per annum including Halol’s production of 85,000 units. Reilly was upbeat about the growth and market share that GM has achieved in the Asia Pacific of which India has been the highest contributor. He said that in the total seven percent market share, India’s contribution stood at an impressive three percent! GM is committed to capture 10% market share by the end of this decade.
Karl Slym, MD, GM India has also been pretty vocal about the bullish plans that GM has laid out for India. The Captiva is currently sold as a CBU but Slym said that they are looking at the flexibility of manufacturing such products in India itself so as to gain an advantage in pricing. The sales of Chevrolet Captiva have been decent, but just imagine the northward march it will see if the Captiva was manufactured in India!
GM is also in the process of investing a lot in the powertrain facility at Pune as it will further help localize the products to as high as 80-90 percent from the existing 40-50 percent. Additionally, GM could also be looking at introducing pick-up trucks in India. Reilly said that India could be a good market for such a product and Slym added that feasibility study for assembling pick-up trucks and vans in India are already going on and a final word will be reached upon in about 12 months.
GM is now playing an attacking game and is ready to take chances. With the kind of resources the American company is putting in, we are sure they have good things in the pipeline for India. And being the lucrative market that it is, no one can discount India at all.
