Ford India has said that it has now the youngest portfolio in the passenger car market and will also quicken the launch of facelifts or refreshes to achieve and sustain growth.
“As part of the product-led transformation plans to drive growth 2.0, we have been looking at faster refresh rate for our cars. In the past we would have done roll out facelifts once in 2.5 years or 3.5 years. But, we are moving to a point where we will have a refresh in the second year itself,” Anurag Mehrotra, Executive Director, Marketing, Sales & Service at Ford India told The Hindu.
In line with the revamped strategy, the US carmaker on Wednesday rolled out its new EcoSport, incorporating more power, new engine technology and much improved styling. This compact SUV facelift comes at a starting price of Rs.6.79 lakh (ex-showroom, New Delhi) and the top end diesel-variant is priced at about Rs.10.4 lakh. Packed with more power and new features, the new EcoSport will seek to counter the competition from Hyundai’s Creta and Maruti’s S-Cross.
“It is only 0.5 per cent higher than previous version. We have done three major things in the new EcoSport. Firstly, it comes with more power (from 90 PS to 100 PS). Secondly, internationally renewed EcoBoost engine is now available for this segment with a trim level. Thirdly, we have added massive amount of styling in the new EcoSport,” he added.
Thus, Ford has now three new products in its portfolio – its all new compact sedan Aspire, Figo refresh and now EcoSport facelift. It will also launch the facelift of premium SUV Endeavour soon.
With new set of products in its portfolio, Ford seeks create some excitement among the car buyers as also drive the sales level to higher growth rate during this festive season. Aided by new launches, it has seen over 22 per cent growth in sales in the past two months as against the industry growth of four per cent plus. However, Ford India’s sales were still down about 15 per cent during first half of this fiscal as against the year-ago period.
Ford set out Growth 2.0 plan and to embrace this for the next two years. One of the biggest elements of this growth of 2.0 vision is product led-transformation which encompasses new launches and shorter duration for roll out of product refreshes.
