Automotive giant Honda Motorcycle & Scooter India's Rs 1,100-crore manufacturing plant at Vithalapur village in Ahmedabad district was inaugurated by Gujarat Chief Minister Anandiben Patel today.
The scooter plant, which is the fourth two-wheeler manufacturing facility of Honda Motorcycle & Scooter India Pvt Ltd (HMSI) in the country, has a total capacity to produce 1.2 million automatic scooters annually.
The company has invested Rs 1,100 crore to set up this facility, where Honda will make its flagship brand of scooter Activa and Dio, said company's Group Vice President and Director V Sridhar.
"This plant in Gujarat has become our fourth two-wheeler plant in India after Haryana, Rajasthan and Karnataka. This plant is having the capacity to churn out 12 lakh automatic scooters, mainly Activa and Dio.
"Commercial production of 6 lakh units started today. In the later stage, we will start the second line of production by mid of 2016 to add another 6 lakh scooters," he said.
At present, HMSI manufactures 46 lakh two-wheelers, including bikes, in three of their plants annually. With this new plant, its total two-wheeler production capacity in the country will increase by 26 per cent to 58 lakh units by the end of this year, Sridhar added.
"This plant is spread across 250 acres. It has created 3,000 direct as well as indirect job opportunities. Out of these 3,000 jobs, 900 are direct jobs provided by us. 85 per cent of our staff in the plant are from Gujarat," he said.
Patel remembered Prime Minister Narendra Modi for envisioning the development of Gujarat by bringing in such companies to open their plants here when he was at the helm of affairs in the state.
"Due to such companies, many of our ITI students got jobs. When I was an MLA of this region in 1998, I remember how people used to struggle. It was Narendrabhai (Narendra Modi) who used his relations and brought such companies in Gujarat for the overall development of such regions," said Patel.
Giving logic behind setting up a 'scooters only' plant here, company's senior VP for sales & marketing YS Guleria stated that the market for automatic scooters in India is growing at an enormous rate.
"Activa was launched in 2001. Even after these many
years, that model is still in demand. Due to such high demand, we are still having 13,000 pending orders of Activa.
"Further, automatic scooters are getting more popular than motorcycles in India. Thus, we don't want to miss this market opportunity. This plant will help us in fulfilling the ever increasing demand for our scooters", Guleria said.
President and CEO of HMSI Keita Muramatsu said that increasing adoption of scooters, a trend seen earlier in developed countries, is the key driver for Indian two-wheeler industry today. "HMSI enjoys 56 per cent marketshare in this segment in India, while we command 62 per cent share in Gujarat. Now, Honda scooters are not just Made in India, but also 'Made in Gujarat'."
In the current fiscal year of 2015-16 so far, Honda two-wheelers has sold a total of 3.73 million units.
Of this, scooter sales alone stood at 2.3 million units, an increase of 13 per cent on year-on-year basis, said Guleria.
