Yamaha’s Chennai plant to start operations by January

Japanese two-wheeler maker Yamaha’s new plant, on the outskirts of Chennai, will start operations by January, according to Masaki Asano, Managing Director, Yamaha Motor India Sales Pvt Ltd. This is the marketing and sales arm of Yamaha in India, while vehicle production is part of India Yamaha Motor.

The company will invest ₹1,500 crore in phases till 2018 in the plant at Vallam Vadagal in Kanchipuram district.

“We have not yet decided the date of the inauguration. It depends upon the availability of various dignitaries,” Asano told reporters on the sidelines of a function.

To begin with, Yamaha will produce scooters at the plant, which will have an initial annual capacity of four lakh units. The capacity will increase to 18 lakh units by 2018. While signing a memorandum of understanding with the State Government in 2012, Yamaha had said the new factory will employ 1,800 people at the start of operations and in five years around 6,500.

The new factory will be the first in the Yamaha Motor group to have a vendor park in its vicinity. This will reduce losses in the areas of production management and distribution. There will be very little import of components, said Roy Kurian, Vice-President, Sales and Marketing, Yamaha Motor India Sales. In 2012, Yamaha had said that with the new factory and the increased production capacity at the company’s plants in Surajpur (Uttar Pradesh) and Faridabad (Haryana), Yamaha will have a combined motorcycle production capacity of 2.8 million units by 2018.

Kurian said there has been a gradual shift towards scooters from motorcycles, and the shift has been quite rapid in the South.

For instance, two years ago, scooters accounted for 40 per cent of two-wheelers sold in Kerala and motorcycles the balance. This has been reversed now due to factors such as increased usage of two-wheelers by women and the convenience of driving a scooter, he said. Yamaha hopes to double its two-wheeler market share to 10 per cent in couple of years.

Yamaha plans to sell around 6 lakh units in the domestic market and export around 2 lakh units this year, Kurian said.

The company felicitated Meenakshi Sundaram Subramanian, a technician with a Yamaha dealer in Madurai for winning the Yamaha World Technician Grand Prix 2014 held in Japan recently. He won the contest among 33,000 participants from 21 countries.

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