Mahindra & Mahindra today said that it plans to hire over 250 people by 2015 for its pre- owned vehicles business, even as it gears up to meet the target of selling one lakh units every year by 2014.
"There is a huge demand for second-hand vehicles... Our target is to sell one lakh pre-owned cars every year by 2014. Accordingly, our staff strength will also increase and it will be more than double from the existing number of employees," Mahindra & Mahindra President (HR, After-Market, Corporate Services) Rajeev Dubey told reporters here.
The pre-owned vehicle division of the company -- Mahindra FirstChoice -- employs about 250 people at present. Stating that it sold about 18,000 vehicles in 2009-10, he said that it aims to achieve sales of over 36,000 units this fiscal.
Dubey said the size of the pre-owned car market comes to 1.1 times of the new car market, which witnessed sales of about 15 lakh units last fiscal. "The pre-owned car market is growing at 15-18 per cent per annum," he added.
In order to achieve its target, the company plans to aggressively expand its network across the country. "We will expand our pre-owned sales point to 500 stores from the existing 125 outlets by 2015," Dubey said.
While most of the stores would be opened by franchisee partners, a few would be company-owned.
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"About 30 outlets will be under the brand -- SuperStore. Usually, the outlets that sell more than 100 cars are opened with this brand and these have 30,000 sq ft of area," he said.
The company also expects the total turnover from the pre-owned car business to double this fiscal from Rs 430 crore in 2009-10, Dubey said.
In 2008, M&M had raised Rs 80 crore through a private placement in FirstChoice from Phi Advisors, promoted by Anupam Thareja and P Sivaram.