Honda Motorcycle and Scooter India, which proudly and boldly emphasizes in each of its communication that they are the ‘ONLY Honda in India’, at a press conference announced that they will be launching 9 new models in India this financial year. That’s surprisingly less than the 15 new models they had announced in their last press conference. The manufacturer however did not divulge details on 8 of these models but for the remaining one they specified that it will be a ‘Revolutionary’ product and we have already talked about it here.
Now, if we try to understand, we see they they have the CBR650F, sub-40,000 entry level motorcycle and some scooters in pipeline. From the existing lot, it is expected that these 8 new launches will include the updated CBR250R (or the new CBR300R) and dual-headlamp CBR150R which are already on sale in some international markets.
Other Key Pointers
Apart from new products, Honda also shared the following key pointers with the media…
- They want to increase their touch points in the country. The expansion will see addition of 800 sales & service touch-points for larger rural brand footprint.
- They also plan to increase the last mile rural customer support with 20 Mobile service vans and 825 Service on wheels.
- They want to expand their production capacity by 39 percent in 2 years.
- They want to bring line flexibility of 8 lac units.
- They are operating at their peak levels in all their 3 existing plants. The 4th plant (dedicated to scooters) will start operations by January 2016 and Honda expects total sales to spiral to about 47 lac two wheelers in this financial year. In comparison, they sold 44.5 lac two wheelers this financial year, which was their best ever performance in India. Honda was the highest market share gainer in India.
- They want to get ready to sell 64 lakh two wheelers by 2016.
- Honda also announced that they are number one in terms of sales in top 35 towns of the country.
Honda is by far the most aggressive manufacturer in India and they have real high targets of upsetting their erstwhile partner Hero. In a recent spate, they also accused Hero of misleading customers with unreal fuel economy claims (Read report here).
