Armed with majority control in Maruti Udyog Ltd, Japanese car giant Suzuki has embarked on an ambitious strategy to elevate the Indian car producer to global map as the group's sole supplier of small cars to Europe while racing ahead with facelift of some other vehicles for the domestic market.
"We want to make Maruti another Suzuki in two years," Osamu Suzuki, chairman of Suzuki Motor Corporation, told PTI on the sidelines of Tokyo Motor Show, while committing that the Japanese company would collaborate with Maruti to develop new model.
Reflecting the paradigm shift in the strategy of technology transfer to development of capability for churning out products on its own, Suzuki said, "This model will of course be suitable for Indian conditions. It will also do well in the export markets."
As such a team of experts from SMC is working in India for facelifiting and upgradation of some of the existing vehicles and results of this would be evident "soon", industry sources said without specifying the time frame or the models on which the work was on.
This was in addition to SMC's commitment to develop MUL as a fully equipped entity to develop new products by 2007 on its own, according to a top official of SMC and MUL chairman Shinzo Nakanishi.
Emphasising on the importance of MUL in SMC's overall growth strategy, Suzuki said "Maruti is very important for us. It is the most important overseas plant for Suzuki. We want to make Maruti a Suzuki in two years."
Earlier, Nakanishi told the visiting Indian journalists at SMC's headquarters in Hamamatsu that "our chairman has desired that we introduce a new model in India every year... we will fulfill his desire."
Nakanishi said that MUL would become the production and export centre for SMC's entry level small cars to Europe which would further enhance the Indian entity's position in the global strategy of Japanese giant.