GM India will not cede ground in Chinese alliance

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"We did not bring a European car to India and expect it to perform in India but spent the last 18 months working on the Cruze to make sure its suspension, engine etc were suited to India," he said.

A section of industry observers believe that the SAIC tie-up will see the Chinese "walk all over GM India" but Mr Slym insisted that this was not the case and, on the contrary, that everything boiled down to business opportunities.

"It is a naïve thought for anyone to believe that in this global world, you cannot have companies successful in one country when their base is in another. That is what we did here with Daewoo where all the products to date were from Korea and have been very good for us here. We did not try to have a Korea in India but used the benefits of the Daewoo products and of the local culture here," he said. According to Mr Slym, GM India is "at a tipping point at the moment" given that it is set to launch the Beat mini-car by the end of this year.

This is because a lot of effort had gone into creation of the Chevrolet base in terms of the centres for engineering, design and powertrain.

In addition, the company has commissioned its Talegaon plant near Pune whose capacity can be optimised to 300,000 units annually to supplement the Halol facility's output of 85,000 units.

"This is now the time for us to step over the edge and take advantage of all the efforts we have put in over the years," he said.

Today, Maruti , Hyundai, Tata Motors  and Mahindra are the top four players in the automobile arena but GM India is confident that it now has the right building blocks in place.

"Our long term goal is to grow and use our capacity and also challenge the top four for those places in market share. I do believe we have a suitable product portfolio to do that," Mr Slym said.

Taken from Business Line