Japanese automobile group Yamaha is expected to start operations at its Chennai plant with commercial production expected to start in early 2015.
Yamaha hopes to double its two wheeler market share in India to 10 per cent in a couple of year’s time, a senior official said.
“We will be rolling out scooters first from the plant,” Asano Masaki, CEO and Managing Director, Yamaha Motor India Sales Pvt. Ltd., told reporters on the sidelines of a company function.
According to Mr. Masaki, the new plant will have an annual production capacity of 400,000-440,000 vehicles taking the total two-wheeler production capacity of Yamaha in India to around 1.4 million units. The company's other plant is at Surajpur in Uttar Pradesh.
For the current calendar year, the company is targeting to sell 600,000 units in the domestic market and export around 200,000 units.
When asked about the excess capacity, Vice President Roy Kurian said: “The two wheeler industry is growing. We are also expanding our distribution network. We will need the fresh capacity.”
Meanwhile, the company plans to increase the number of Yamaha Training Academies by four to 10 units.
“We are training youngsters in two-wheeler mechanics and most of them are absorbed at our dealer-end,” Ravinder Singh, Vice President, Strategy Planning said.
The company felicitated Meenakshi Sundaram Subramanian, a mechanic in one of its dealer outlets, who stood first in the Yamaha World Technician Grand Prix 2014 held in Japan recently.
