 "Reaching beyond Tier-II markets is the key challenge: Christian Mardrus")
Japanese auto major Nissan inaugurated a new plant, along with French partner Renault, in 2010. The plant, located at Oragadam near Chennai, rolled out its one millionth car on Friday. The alliance partners have invested Rs 6,100 crore in the plant, which has the potential to become one of the hubs in the AMIL (Africa, Middle East and India) region. Christian Mardrus, senior vice-president and chairman of the Management Committee for AMIL, spoke to T E Narasimhan on how the company plans to achieve a market share of five per cent by 2020. Edited excerpts:
How important is this milestone of rolling out the millionth car?
It is a great achievement. If you look at what we have achieved in the last five years, you can see our growth has been good. Parallely, we have done a lot many things like launching the plant, along with different types of models under the three brands (Nissan, Renault and Datsun). We have a huge variety of products in the market currently. This is a global plant as it not only caters to India, but also different markets. Overall, it’s an important achievement. I won’t say everything went well as this venture had some hiccups, but we have come out of all those. Looking at our achievements, I am completely optimistic about the future.
Nissan has set a target to achieve five per cent market share by 2020, up from two per cent now. How optimistic are you in achieving this target, keeping in mind the current environment? Does Nissan have enough products to achieve it?
With our current strategy, it is no longer just a dream. I am confident of achieving it. We have got action plans that are running according to schedule, along with the desired investments in the products in order to achieve it. Besides existing products, new products will come as the market is extremely demanding and we have to satisfy our customers. The availability of too many products dilutes our efforts. So, we try to have limited number of product stocks.
Did Datsun meet your expectations considering the brand is not yet visible?
Datsun has a huge opportunity and complements Nissan. Having the portfolio of two huge brands requires positioning each brand at the right level. For Datsun, we need to make more efforts in India, specially in its marketing, to make the brand more aware among consumers. Datsun is a huge asset for India, Middle East and Africa.
Will Datsun have its own set of dealers?
There may be an opportunity to develop specific Datsun outlets in interior regions of the country. Penetrating beyond Tier-II is one of the key challenges for us because today, we are only positioned in Tier-I and -II cities. With Datsun, we have the opportunity to cover some Tier-III cities, but we need to work towards it. We need to expand our reach to new customers and be innovative in marketing our products.
What about exports?
Our strategy is to focus both on the domestic and export markets. This plant can act as one of our regional plants for sourcing vehicles.
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