Nissan Motor India does not seem to leave a single stone unturned, when it comes to using the very elegant Sunny to its utmost advantage. Sunny, which is the car maker's locally built mid-level sedan, achieved huge popularity even prior to its launch. Observing the response, the company is likely to export its latest product to West Asia and Africa, during the early phases of the next year, where the demand for Sunny-like cars is quite high. The future move was confirmed by Kiminobu Tokuyama, Managing Director, Nissan Motor India.
Nissan seemed confident and assured as it launched the Sunny in India. As a matter of fact, Sunny is Nissan's second locally made vehicle after Micra, which was rolled-out last October.
The base variant of Sunny, the XE, is priced around Rs. 5.78 lacs while the mid-range model, the XL, costs around 6.69 lacs. The top-end version that is XV, is available at a price of Rs. 7.68 lacs.
Though our priority is the local market, we will also aggressively pursue export volumes," Tokuyama was quoted as saying. He further claimed that the Japanese car maker plans to launch a multi-purpose vehicle in the country next year. "It is going to be an MPV like Toyota Innova," he said. However, details regarding the price and other features of the vehicle were kept under covers.
While Nissan Sunny is being made available in the local, West Asian and African markets, Micra was sold in Europe. Tokuyama said that he was completely satisfied with Micra's export numbers which reached 1 lac in 11 months.
"This time around we are targeting the West Asia because of the demand there. Besides, we have already placed sedans from our UK and Spanish units in the European market," Tokuyama said, stating that the company is working at supporting India to emerge as a supply chain management hub apart from countries such as Japan, China and the United Kingdom.
Nissan Motors India, which has a capacity to manufacture 2,00,000 vehicles per year through its plant Oragadam near Chennai, plans to expand its dealer networks to 60 by next year, from the current 45.
The company has, so far, 5 models under its belt in India namely Micra, Teana, 370Z sports car, X-Trail and Sunny. At present, Nissan employs around 4,700 people at its manufacturing unit and approximately 1,900 personnel at its research and development centre in Chennai.
On continuing to use Ennore port in Tamil Nadu for its export activities, Tokuyama said, "Export efficiency is critical to our Indian operations and we are having some issues with Ennore port in this respect where there is a lot of work to be done on costs and general infrastructure. We are in close communication with the port authority about these issues."
Thus, Nissan is currently experimenting a lot, with coercive steps in place, in order to boost its performance further amid aggressive competition and challenging trends prevailing in the auto market.
