Honda Cars India reveals its future goals and progress

Even a couple of years back, Honda Cars India had a hard time sustaining in the Indian car market. India being a diesel car loving market posed to be a tough ground for the Japanese luxury car maker, as it was still an all Petrol car maker back then. Desperate to have a secure position in India, Honda launched its first ever diesel car in the country in the form of the Amaze compact sedan. This changed everything for the company; the mini sedan came out to be a rescuer for the company and helped it to revive to a much better position in the Indian car market.

Honda, though still has a long way to go. The Japanese company plans to get a much better positioning in India, and even aspires for the top spot in the domestic car market. Buoyed by the Amaze’s amazing success, Honda has gone ahead launching the al new City also with its diesel counterpart and has plans to soon launch more new cars all with diesel variants.

Giving an insight to the company’s future planning and line of progress, Honda Cars India’s president and CEO, Hironori Kanayama revealed quite a few things to the media.

About the Japanese car maker’s new strategy in India, Kanayama revealed that Honda has grown a lot and its global sales in the last financial year have achieved the sales milestone of 4 million. In the new future, the car major has plans to sell 6 million vehicles by the fiscal of 2016-17. The company is also highly focusing on developing in the car markets like India and to hike sales rates. The company’s first strategy was to develop a powerful and efficient diesel engine, as this is already achieved the company’s second strategy was to have the maximum local contents. The company has been able to do that also. Currently, the Amaze compact sedan has localized content of 90 percent, while this is even higher for the new City, standing at 92 percent. Now, the third strategy of the company is to be achieved and that is to increase the company’s footprint in smaller cities and towns in India.

Kanayama said that the company does not have enough resources to cater to the demands of Tier-II and Tier-III towns and cities that have good demands of Honda vehicles. Honda plans to have 170 dealership outlets in 110 cities by this fiscal.

Honda is also contemplating to fill the gaps in its product range by launching a sub-Rs 20 lakhs SUV that will be launch within a couple of years.

While speaking on the company’s diesel product focus, Kanayama said when the company launched the Amaze, 80 percent of the cars in India were diesel powered, but now it has reduced to 70 percent.

While speaking on India’s European Union free trade agreement, Kanayama said that the SIAM is looking into the matter, but it is the Indian Government’s call. However, the company needs fair situation to compete.