Bypassing Gujarat

As Gujarat forges ahead with its plan to become Asia’s largest car-manufacturing hub, every visit by top officials of automobile companies is seen as a “step” towards setting up a plant in the state. So much so that on a recent visit to Ahmedabad, Peter Honegg, MD and CEO of Mercedes-Benz India, had to try hard and convince the media that he was in Ahmedabad to inaugurate the company’s dealership and not to explore the possibility of setting up a plant. “It would take us about 10 years from now to get exhausted with our current unit at Chakan, Pune. After that we may consider Gujarat for a unit,” he said. “To make this happen, Mercedes sales in India have to scale up to at least 80,000 units a year from the current about 6,000 units a year,” he added laughingly.