Maruti Suzuki India Limited has already beat its parent company in sales last month. The company now plans to go independent of Suzuki Motor Corp and develop its own R&D unit to manufacture cars that address Indian customer needs. Suzuki has its R&D center in Rohtak which is its only state-of-art research center outside Japan. MSIL has been recently on a shopping spree for talent. Its talent hunt took it to international shores where it has been extensively hiring auto engineers from places like Detroit. “The target is to make the R&D capability independent and self sufficient by 2012,” said SY Siddiqui, head of administration, HR, IT & Finance at Maruti.
MSIL intends to have more than a 1000 auto engineers in its R&D team to improvise upon its research skills. The company intends to launch a 100 percent made in India car by 2012 which has been exclusively conceived, designed and developed in India by Indian engineers.
So far MSIL has been relying extensively on inputs from Japan which it now intends to forego. “The idea is that the development of small new cars particularly for India should be done more and more in India,” said Maruti Suzuki chairman RC Bhargava. Maruti intends to invest about Rs 1500 crores in next 3-4 years for the development of its R&D unit near Delhi.
