Kia Motors to begin trial production at Anantapur in January 2019

by IndianAuto Team | 07/12/2018
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Kia Motors has announced to start off the trial production at Anantapur plant along with employ 3,000 people in January 2019.

Kia Motors India is the Indian arm of Kia Motors and part of the Hyundai Group, is looking to launch a new dealer network which is considered the “most extensive” in the Indian market. 

Kia Motors logo outside the showroom

Kia Motors India is looking to the "most extensive" dealer network

Particularly, the company has spent a $ 1.1 billion investment which equals to Rs 7,005 crore in the Indian market. As for the scale, the new plant at Anantapur district of Andhra Pradesh will have the capacity of 3,00,000 units per annum. The plant structure is claimed to be erected and start to be in the process of installing the equipment. It will soon be ready for the operations. In the first phase, Kia Motors set the schedule to produce 90 percent of vehicles in the domestic market and 10 percent will be dedicated for export.

Production line up of Kia

Kia has invested Rs 7,005 crore in the Indian market

In a press release recently, Manohar Bhat, the Head of Marketing and Sales from Kia Motors India, said,

“We will begin trial production by early next year and eventually mature our process to commence mass production by middle of 2019.”

upcoming plant of Kia

The trial production is expected to be taken in effect by the middle of next year

Back to February this year, the automaker has showcased the compact crossover which was the SP Concept at the Auto Expo 2018. Following by the mark with the SP, Kia Motors will intend to launch other models for the shake of penetrating deeply into the domestic market. This intention was also stated by Bhat,

“The SUV segment is the most growing segment right now anywhere in the world and we want to target that space,”

One of the future plans of Kia Motors is to add more models that fit the Indian market into its production line-up. Along with gradually studying the Indian market, Kia Motors will introduce the second model by Auto Expo 2020. 

Inside Kia Motors manufactering

The next models of Kia Motors will be closer to the Indian market's requirement

“We are going to introduce one new model every six months and aim to reach full capacity utilisation within three years from launch,” 

As for the plans of the dealer network in the domestic market, Bhat has stated,

“We are working on having ‘touch-points’ up to the Tier 4 level, and we will have the most extensive network, to begin with, for any new entrant into the Indian market.”

He added

“We want to reassure our customers with our presence in every part of the country and be ready to offer them aftersales support whenever they need it. While we will be establishing our network in a phase-wise manner, we need to be ready with a robust presence at the start to a certain extent, given that we will be adopting an aggressive launch strategy and cannot ramp up our network every six months.”

Kia Motors showroom

Kia Motors is expected to employ a large number of human resources

Finally, he ended it up by saying,

“We will adopt our globally followed 'Red Cube’ design theme for our all our outlets to represent the brand and we will begin our brand campaign in the country by end of December,” 

Kia Motors India will set to recruit 3,000 people for the Anantapur plant. As a part of Kia plan, the automaker will ramp up the production from year to year. Initially, it will start from 100,000 units in the first year with a single shift, and in the second year and third year, the production will go up to 200,000 units and 300,000 units with 3 shifts respectively. At the very first phase, the annual capacity at the plant would be considered only for domestic sales in India.

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