Indian auto market, growing at a rapid pace has taken the country ahead of brazil to make it the 6th largest automobile manufacturing nation in the world, according to Organisation Internationale des Constructeurs d’Automobiles on the basis of the first six month data of the year. Leading the pack was China followed by Unites States of America, Japan, Germany and Korea. Currently China continues to top the chart with a total production figure of 9.16 million units till June this year. Following China is US whose production figure stands at 4.27 million units. Germany and India follow closely behind them with production figures of 2.93 million units and 2.73 million units respectively. This year all the countries showed a growth in their total auto production except Japan which showed a decline of 17% decline in production to 6.71 million units due the country getting hit by the tsunami and earthquakes. Domestic sales also declined by 20% to 3.47 million units till October.
“Though vehicle sales have slowed down this year, the fundamentals remain strong. By 2017, India is likely to emerge as the third-largest market in the world after China and the US, ” Abdul Majeed, partner and head of automotive practice in the global professional services firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers.
India is expected to beat Korea, Germany and Japan by 2017 to sell close to 7 million units. Earlier it was estimated that this would take place by the year 2020 but the J.D Power market research firm speculates that the Indian auto market is going to grow 3 fold by the year 2020, a time when India would be selling close to almost 11 million vehicles. PricewaterhouseCoopers projects that India would be producing about 7 million light vehicles of up to 5 tonnes by 2017. India has clearly taken over Brazil this year with a production figure of 2.04 million units till June this year while that Brazil stood at 1.71 million units. With this, the Indian auto market has witnessed an increased market share and currently stands at 5% as compared to the earlier 4.5% of the global vehicle production. With the rapidly growing auto market in India and all the major OEMs targeting India as their manufacturing hub, the country is surely all set to take on China and US in the near future to become the largest automotive producer in the world.
