Honda Motorcycle and Scooter is all set to start construction of its manufacturing facility in Gujarat, which will be the centre for producing scooters only. The growth of scooters in the last couple of years has raised the position of the Japanese manufacturer in the country by a fair margin. The new manufacturing facility will be capable enough to produce 1.2 million units every year. It is expected that such numbers will be able to meet the expectations of the market in the recent times. Currently, the Honda scooters that run in the market are Activa series models, the Dio and the Aviator series models.
The new manufacturing facility of Honda is located in the region of Vithalpur in Gujarat. It is spread across a total land area of 250 acres and is about 80 kilometres away from the city of Ahmedabad. The plant will start functioning by the end of 2015 and a total investment of 1100 crores INR is being done for the facility. Approximately, 3000 people will be employed within the first couple of years of production. As a result of this production unit, the total manufacturing capacity of Honda will touch 5.8 million units a year. The rest of the units will be coming from the Haryana production facility (1.6 million units), Karnataka production unit (1.8 million units) and Rajasthan (1.8 million units).
Honda is expecting that India will contribute almost 25 per cent of the global sales, which is estimated to be at 18.5 million units a year. In the previous financial year, when the Indian wing contributed almost 20 per cent, the sales figure raised up to 17 million units. Sales of scooters have seen a tremendous boost in the last couple of years with the growth in market share amounting to nearly 29 per cent. It now consists 27 per cent of the current market space in the Indian two-wheeler industry and has string chances to rise up further. All this require a boost in the production of scooters and Honda is just preparing itself for reaching that.
