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Detroit-headquartered Ford Motor Company’s Indian arm on Thursday inaugurated its second factory in this country at Sanand, 30 kilometres from Ahmedabad.
The arm showcased its upcoming car from the site, a compact sedan, Ford Figo Aspire. The company said it had planned to establish India as an export hub. Also, it wanted to triple its exports from here over five years.
Anurag Mehrotra, executive director for marketing, sales, and service, Ford India, said half of the combined production from their Sanand and Chennai units would be for export. The company, however, did not wish to put a figure to the target.
Nigel Harris, the president of Ford India, said the Figo Aspire would be launched in the second half of the year. The initial production would be for the domestic market and the company would eventually focus on exporting the model. With 240,000 cars and 270,000 engines a year at the $1-billion (Rs 6,200 crore) factory here, Ford’s capacity in the country would rise to 610,000 engines and 440,000 vehicles annually.
Mehrotra said it planned to launch three models in the Indian market over 12 to 18 months.
Sanand, the company said, was one of its most highly automated plants across the globe. Mehrotra said the body shop was 95 per cent automated and the paint shop almost fully. "There are 125 stations along the production line that have been set up for quality checks," he said. “There were more than 437 robots at the facility.”
Ford India's Sanand facility (pic: Yasin D)
Gujarat chief minister Anandiben Patel said the factory would create direct and indirect employment for more than 4,000, and the company's vendor park nearby would give employment to more than 6,000. Calling the 125 km Sanand-Hansalpur-Vithalapur belt, with the connected nodes of Kadi and Halol, a major automobile hub in the making for the Asia-Pacific region, she said an investment of about Rs 15,000 crore in all had already been committed by various companies, to create annual capacity of 1.25 million four-wheel and two mn two-wheeled ones. Another Rs 10,000-crore investment is awaited from Maruti Suzuki India and Honda Cars India, taking the installed capacity to 2.2 mn vehicles annually in the next six to eight years.
A similar amount of investment has been readied by vendors of these companies. Around 100 of these have either set up facilities or are working on doing so. As for Gujarat, the CM said the government planned to take the share of automotive industries in its overall engineering output to 10 per cent by 2020, from a current 3.7 per cent.
