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Business

India beats Japan, for the first time, in car sales.

By: Karthik :+: Under: Business, Cars, It Happens Only in India
On: ⋅ October 11, 2007 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment
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The Maruti Suzuki Swift, one of the best small cars I have been in.
Image from teemus

Quiet often my friends from real life ask me about my devotion to covering cars in India and this is the deal. Until a few years ago, cars in India still had carburetors and the sports package meant a yellow colored car with alloy wheels. Now all that is changing and India is getting serious with cars and we at UD should too.

Think about it, the Indian flag has a wheel, our ancestors wanted us to talk about wheels, it is our duty right?

Back to the point, The Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers have released figures that suggest that Suzuki has sold more cars in India that it has in Japan in the past two quarters combined.

Maruti Suzuki India Ltd., 54 percent owned by Suzuki, sold 336,758 cars, vans and sport-utility vehicles in the domestic market between April and September, the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers said today. That exceeded the preliminary 315,000 vehicles Suzuki sold in Japan in the same period, according to spokesman Takuma Mizuyoshi.

This serves as good news to all the other companies that have set up shop in the recent past. India is a growing market and stats reveal that the percentage of car owners compared to the rest of the world is small at best.

In India, GM, Honda, Volkswagen AG and half a dozen other companies plan to spend at least $6.6 billion on new factories. Fiat SpA, Nissan Motor Co., Renault and others are linking with local manufacturers.

Only seven in 1,000 people own a car in India, compared with 10 per 1,000 in China, 500 in Western Europe and 450 in the U.S. This year, India’s 1.1 billion people will snap up vans, small trucks and cars more quickly than anyone except the Chinese, according to research firm Global Insight Inc. From 2006 through 2011, India will be the fastest-growing auto manufacturer among the world’s top 20 car-making countries, New York-based accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP says.

The other incentive that automobile manufacturers have is the vast pool of labor available in India, the geographical location and some amazing test tracks aka. roads. If a car can survive in a Desi road, it can pretty much survive anywhere.

India will need to improve it’s roads, unless it wants to be the worlds cheapest test track.

How do you feel about Suzuki’s (in India would be good) and is was Maruti a right name for a company owned by the government that claims to be secular?

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