Tata Motors, the country's largest automobile company, plans to take its Rs 1-lakh car, Nano, to South Africa.
The company is also working on a comprehensive plan to tap the African continent which includes setting up its commercial vehicles manufacturing and assembling facilities in different countries.
Tata Motors managing director Ravi Kant, speaking on the sidelines of the Indo-Africa summit in Delhi on Wednesday said, South Africa is one of the biggest international markets and Nano perfectly fits into the personal transport market. We will be pleased to have Nano in many African nations in future.
Tata Motors will shortly expand the manufacturing facility at Rosslyn in South Africa, which it had acquired from Nissan last year to make trucks and buses.
Among other African nations, the company will start assembling pick-up trucks in Senegal, where it had previously supplied completely knocked down (CKD) kits of buses. The firm is also conducting a feasibility study for assembling semi-knocked down (SKD) kits of commercial vehicles in Congo, and will start selling cars there from this fiscal year.
We are looking at marketing our passenger cars in Congo and possibly will start selling them during this financial year. We are already supplying trucks and buses for public transport. We have a long history in Africa and our buses and vehicles are plying in the continent for many decades,Mr Kant said.
The company supplied 228 buses to the Congo government for urban transportation during the last fiscal. On the issue of rising steel price Mr Kant said that the company has absorbed the hike in the past three months, but was forced to raise prices to keep its profit margins intact.
