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Honda to boost mobike imports from Asia

Japan's second-biggest automaker Honda Motor Co Ltd said on Monday that it planned to expand domestic sales of cheap motorcycles made at its plants in Asia to cash in on growing demand for cut-price vehicles.

"We plan to import motorcycles priced less than 100,000 yen from our manufacturing bases in Asia, especially India and China, and sell them in Japan," Honda president Hiroyuki Yoshino told a news conference.

"We need to improve our production structure to respond to the market demand," he said.

Details of the import plan, which is intended as an answer to Japan's expanding second-hand motorcycle market, will be decided later, he said.

The announcement follows the company's release in Japan of a new series of scooters powered by 4-cycle 50cc engines, targeted mainly at the youth market. Honda said it would aim for domestic sales of 60,000 units for the scooters, which will range in price from 159,000 yen to 179,000 yen.

Yoshino said Honda hopes the worldwide motorcycle market will expand to 30 million units in the near future from a current 21 million units. Honda now boasts a 23.8 percent share of the global motorcycle market, producing five million units at plants in 26 countries.

In Japan, the motorcycle market has shrunk to 780,000 units sold annually, just half of what it was 10 years ago, as consumers increasingly opt for four-wheeled vehicles, Yoshino said.

In a bid to entice price-sensitive Japanese consumers, Honda also plans to form a business alliance with security service company Secom Co Ltd to make Honda motorcycles more secure against theft, Yoshino said without elaborating.

Shares in Honda rose 0.89 per cent to 4,510 yen in afternoon trade in Tokyo, while the benchmark Nikkei-225 share average slipped.

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