The Indian arm of Mercedes-Benz, the German automobile marque, is looking towards contributing about 30 per cent to the overall premium luxury passenger car market of the country by the year 2022. The company has revealed plans to import 250 units of its latest offering, the B-Class Sports Tourer for the current year.
Underlining the company's market projections for the future, Debashis Mitra, Director, Sales and Marketing, Mercedes-Benz India, said, “We are clearly the market leader in the luxury car segment at present. By 2022, we are aiming to capture 30 per cent of the segment,” during a media conference in Kolkata.
Mitra affirmed that after some intense case studies and market research, the company has projected that the total Indian passenger car market will exceed the 80 lac units mark by the year 2022 as against the current recorded value of 25 lac units, currently running on the domestic roads. Mitra also informed that currently the luxury products contribute to about one per cent of the overall fraction of the Indian passenger car market, which is expected to climb by 3 per cent by the year 2022.
Recently, during the launch of Mercedes-Benz B-Class Sports Tourer in Kolkata, Debashis Mitra said, “We aim to sell 70,000 to 80,000 cars in India by that time.” According to him, in order to capitalise on the growing luxury car segment of the country, Mercedes-Benz India has several new generation compact cars in its arsenal, of which it plans to launch one product every year till 2015.
Reportedly, the Indian luxury car market thrived at a 50 per cent Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) during the period 2007 and 2011. However, the market witnessed flat growth during the January and August months of the ongoing year.
Coming to the latest product in the German auto maker's portfolio, the 2012 B-Class Sports Tourer, Mitra informed the press that the company will market the car via the Completely Built Unit (CBU) route in the country's passenger car market. He also said that at present, the Mercedes-Benz B-Class is assembled at the company's manufacturing facilities based in Raastad in Germany and Kecskemet in Hungary. Further, Mitra affirmed that both the production units are operating at higher than planned capacity and the import of Completely Knocked Down (CKD) kits of B-Class Sports Tourer is not currently possible for the company.
Reportedly, the Indian arm of German auto giant has invested some Rs. 850 crore towards the development of its Chakan facility near Pune and currently contributes about 0.5 per cent of Mercedes-Benz's global annual sales. At present, the Indian premium and luxury passenger car market is dominated by big global automotive players like BMW, Mercedes, Audi and the British brand Jaguar.
