Maruti eyes 1mn mark this year

Country's leading car maker, Maruti Suzuki India Limited, is looking at increasing its current capacity of manufacturing cars, to hit the one million mark by October 2008.

On the sidelines of an interactive meet, the company spokesperson said, within the next month of this year, Maruti Suzuki India Limited, is slated to scale up its current capacity of manufacturing cars from 8,70,000 to one million per year.

Maruti currently has three car manufacturing plants in Gurgaon and one car plant and one diesel engine factory in Manesar, about 20 kilometres away from the Gurgaon car plant.

The plant in Gurgaon has a capacity of manufacturing seven lakh cars per year and the plant in Manesar has a capacity of producing 1,70,000 cars which will be scaled to three lakh per year, while the diesel engine factory currently manufactures one lakh engines which is slated to scale it to three lakh by 2010 with an investment of Rs 2,500 crore.

From October this year, a new K series petrol engine manufacturing plant will go onstream in the Maneswar area, with a target of producing one lakh, 1000 cc petrol engines, which will be the second engine unit of Maruti in the country, at an investment of Rs 1,500 crore.

This apart, the company is also looking at introducing its new car, A star by mid- November this year with a target of producing 50,000 cars in the domestic market and exporting about 1 lakh, mainly eyeing the Europan countries, the middle east, Chillie and Latin America.

It will mainly belong to the compact premuim A2 segment, with a price though not fixed, is assumed to be towards Rs 4 lakh with 4 variants. The company plans to start exporting the A star model from January or February, 2009.

In 2007-08 Maruti exported about 53000 cars, across all segments and with the introduction of the A2 variant, it expects its exports to reach 2 lakh cars per year.

Currently the company has capacity of 570, engaged in Research and Development(R&D) which wil increase to 1000 by 2010-11 and by this time the company expects to have full capability of designing a car. Currently about 3.5 per cent of its total sales revenue is used on product, development and design.

With the introduction of new models in the A2 segment, it leads to greater demand of small cars and this car will not affect the market of Swift, which is doing good in the market, added the spokesperson.

A star will be the eighth model for Maruti, in less than four years, which will be exported to 150 countries in 750 variants under the names, Alto and Celerio and a derivative model will be produced for Nissan under the name Pixo in Europe and the middle east market.