Is Hino gearing up for commercial launch by April-May '09?

Home grown commercial vehicle majors Tata Motors and Ashok Leyland might have some stiff competition coming up and this time from an unlikely source, Toyota. Japanese commercial vehicle major Hino, which is half owned by Toyota, has chalked out concrete plans for India.

Here is a verbatim transcript of Sumantra Barooah’s comments on CNBC-TV18. Also watch the accompanying video.

We had mentioned Hino’s plans to enter India about two years back and now, last month they made an official announcement to the same effect. What we learn from our source at Hino is that they are now gearing up for a proper commercial launch of their vehicles. In fact on Thursday they had a presentation in front of no less than 500 prospective customers who are also members of the Bombay Goods Transport Association because these are the people who are prospective customers for Hino. They are going to wait till about April or May to have the first commercial vehicle from Hino -in other words, Toyota’s entry into the commercial vehicle segment in India.

Ashok Leyland and Tata Motors should be worried about their entry because Hino is going to attack the meaty part of the commercial vehicle segment in terms of revenue, which is the medium and heavy commercial vehicles. In fact in the first year of operations, they are targeting to sell about 1,000 vehicles most of which will be imported. Probably in a couple of years they will then look at setting up a plant which we understand currently may come up in the state of Maharashtra and obviously after that buses will follow.

What is the news on Tata’s Jaguar-Land Rover operations? As we all know because of the current economic conditions manufacturers in Europe and North America are facing major problems because of this slowdown and they have to make adjustments in the production level and in the work force accordingly.

Last time when we talked about cut in production of Jaguar-Land Rover, now they have gone ahead and offered VRS (Voluntary Retirement Scheme) to about 16,000 workers and this scheme can be taken up by 198 workers to be precise. We do not have the amount of the package but it will be equivalent to the nine months of wage. The VRS was started on Wednesday and it is open till November end for workers to accept.