with initial investment of $8m by IPI.
Tata Motors, India’s largest commercial automobile company, has
joined other Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) with interest in
setting up automotive assembly plant in Nigeria.
Tata will be partnering Iron Products and Industries (IPI) Limited
that will fund the investment to the tune of $8 million on equipment and
other machinery to assemble the Tata Zenon range of Pick-up trucks in
Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital.
Target date will be towards the last quarter of 2015, BusinessDay learnt.
Breaking this news last Tuesday in Mumbai, India, since the
introduction of the automotive policy by the Federal Government in 2013,
Ravi Pisharody, executive director, commercial vehicles, Tata Motors
Limited, said the automaker was going into partnership with IPI to
assemble Tata Pick-up trucks under the SKD I and II automotive assembly
regimes at various stages of development. IPI is a local automotive
component manufacturer, including steel and aluminium plant.
According to Ravi Pisharody, “Tata definitely have assembly plans for
Nigeria. For us, it is one of the focussed markets within Africa as
well. We have plans to invest in assembly capacity and we are now at the
finance and final stages of when the operations will kick off, but we
are seriously looking at taking off.
“We already have IPI our distributor partner and shall be sharing its
existing facility with plans to supply SKD assembly kits that will
match global industry standards.”
At the ongoing Africa’s media tour of Tata Group establishments by
journalists from South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya, including BusinessDay in
Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad and Bangalore in India, Girish Wagh, senior
vice president in charge of programme planning and project management
for Tata Motors Limited, said Tata Motors was very optimistic of an
increased market share in Nigeria automotive market space, put at 15
percent.
On quality, A K Jindal, head of engineering commercial vehicles,
engineering research centre at the Tata assembly plant in Pune, said the
same standard of vehicles produced in different parts of the world by
the company would be replicated in Nigeria.
by MIKE OCHONMA, India
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