Eicher Motors consolidated net profit rose 45.2 per cent to Rs.413.2 crore for the second quarter ended September 30, 2016.
The firm also said that its two-wheeler arm Royal Enfield will be investing Rs.600 crore in the current fiscal, major chunk of which will go into the upcoming third plant in Chennai and a technical center in the U.K.
Total consolidated income rose 35 per cent to Rs 1,981.01 crore, which is the highest ever quarterly income from operations for the company. This is against Rs 1,468.03 crore income in the same period last fiscal.
Royal Enfield sold 1,66,941 units in the second quarter of 2016-17, up 30.8 per cent from 1,27,611 units sold in the year ago period. Eicher Motors MD & CEO Siddhartha Lal, on a conference call, said, “All our key projects on capacity and product development are progressing as per plans. We held the ground-breaking ceremony of our third plant in Vallam Vadagal, Tamil Nadu in May this year and we are aiming start of commercial production by Q2 2017-18.
“Our technical centre in U.K. is in advanced stages of development and should be operational by end of 2016-17. We will soon commence work on the Chennai technical centre that is planned to be operational by end 2017-18.” Stating that the response from newly introduced Himalayan motorcycle has been very good, Mr. Lal said: “Going ahead, we will have one big product this financial year, we will be launching something significant next year, we will have variants as well.”
Volvo ventureVE Commercial Vehicles, Eicher’s joint venture with the Volvo Group, sold 13,408 vehicles, up nearly 14 per cent from 11,7657 in the same period last year. “VECV has significantly outperformed the industry in the first six months of FY 2016-17 with an impressive growth of 24% as compared to an industry growth of around 4 per cent,”Mr. Lal said.
