Despite the commercial vehicle industry enduring one of its worst years in recent history, the country’s largest truck manufacturer, Tata Motors, has announced that it would invest Rs 1,500 crore in the coming financial year to develop new products and technologies.
A report on the Economic Times quotes the company’s executive director for commercial vehicles, Ravi Pisharody, saying that apart from the development of new products and technologies, there won’t be any addition of capacity as he says that the company has got capacity for the next five years.
Tata Motors’ sales, like any other truck-maker in India, has been plummeting for the last 48 months, with February 2014 alone seeing a drop in sales by a whopping 49 percent, to 23,990 units compared to the same period in 2013 when it had sold 47,389 units.
The company had recently launched its low-cost brand of trucks, the Tata Prima LX brand, that retails for a little less than its Prima range. Pisharody in the report says that the money mentioned above will go into developing products that will make the company ready for when the market bounces back, which he expects would be in the latter part of 2014.
He also mentioned that at least 4-5 variants of the Ultra LCV would be launched during the next fiscal.
[Source - The Economic Times]
