Ashok Leyland Confident to Revamp the Foreign Business
Published On Jul 25, 2016
India’s second largest commercial vehicle manufacturer Ashok Leyland has shown good sales in the Q1 of current fiscal year. The company has posted a staggering 101 percent profit in the sales. It has now planned to revamp its global business, which has somewhat not been able to meet the expected targets. To ensure that the brand gets its international sales back, Ashok Leyland has decided to start a new assembly plant in the African country of Kenya, the first in the continent.
Mr. Gopal Mahadevan, CEO, Ashok Leyland, said, “We have firmed up our plans to set up assembly plant in Kenya. We are going to invest there. We will start with 3,000 units (in terms of plant capacity). Investments, it is not going to take more than USD 5 million.” Commenting on the low sales, he said, “It is only seven percent (revenues from overseas in April-June 2016 quarter). We expect to catch up in second and third quarters.”
Apart from the Kenya truck and bus assembly plant, there is one truck assembly unit that is going to be established in Bangladesh with a partner. The company would be enhancing the production capacity of its UAE situated plant to 6000 units from the present capacity of 4000. Mr. Mahadevan said, “Our capacity expansion in there has been happening. It has gone up from 2,000 units to 4,000 units. Now we are looking at increasing it to 6,000 units per annum.” On the domestic front, the company grew at 18.5 percent, compared to the industry’s 14.5 percent in Q1 of current fiscal years compared to the same period last year with total unit sales of 22,961 units.
