Cruising Main Street ; After Leaving Its Winged Mark On the Scooters Segment, Honda Motorcycle & Scooter India Is Ramping Up Capacity of What It's Better Known For: Motorcycles.
Summary
Since 1949, the year in which it began mass production of motorcycles, till April 2005, Honda Motor has built all of 150 million motorcycles worldwide (for Honda, motorcycles includes scooters as well as all-terrain vehicles and personal watercraft). In 2004 alone, Honda sold 10.8 million bikes manufactured in 28 global plants located in 21 countries. Of that number, some 2.34 million were sold in India alone, via Hero Honda Motors (the 21- year joint venture with the Munjals) and the four-year-old wholly- owned subsidiary Honda Motorcycle & Scooter India (HMSI). That makes India pretty much one of Honda's biggest bases in Asia, which as a region sold a little over 7 million bikes.
The importance of India-accounting for a little over a fifth of total sales-is amply evident in those numbers, and probably explains the need for two ventures, one joint, and the other wholly-owned (although it must be pointed out that Honda has three affiliates in China, which in 2003 did collective sales of 1.13 million two- wheelers). Now the Japanese giant's India thrust has for long revolved around Hero Honda, partly because of the time-worn depth of the alliance, and also partly because Honda had an agreement with the Munjals not to make motorcycles (as against scooters) till 2004. That year came and went, and HMSI launched the 150-CC mobike Unicorn, which didn't exactly set the Delhi-Manesar highway on fire. With bike production, at the Manesar plant, of just under 65,000 in a total domestic market of 5 million, let's face it: Honda's fully- owned subsidiary just doesn't count. Not yet. True, it's cornered close to half of the scooters market in the past five years, but then scooters is just 20 per cent of the entire two-wheeler market (although it's set to increase to close to 30 per cent in two-three years).See the full content of this document
Extract
Cruising Main Street ; After Leaving Its Winged Mark On the Scooters Segment, Honda Motorcycle & Scooter India Is Ramping Up Capacity of What It's Better Known For: Motorcycles.
So, is Honda content to let its Indian JV lead the Indian charge, with the 100 per cent subsidiary just filling in a flank? Hardly. Yukihiro Aoshima, Chief at HMSI-and the pointman for all Honda ventures in India-may not say it loud and clear but sources at HMSI reveal that the 996,290-million yen (Rs 41,000-...
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