General Motors India (GMI), will continue to sell vehicles only under the Chevrolet brand, its president and managing director has said.
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“We will continue to roll out newer models under [the] Chevrolet [brand] and there will be no other brands,” Karl Slym told the Hindustan Times on the sidelines of the media launch of an LPG variant of the entry level Spark.
The Chevrolet brand has a lengthy heritage in India, having first arrived in 1928, according to GMI’s website. An office was set up in Bombay (now Mumbai) and an assembly plant constructed in Sewree. GM was in fact the first automaker to open an assembly plant in the country. Production started in 1928 with a US designed model called the National Series AB Touring. In the first year of production, 13,903 GM cars and trucks were built at Sewree, including models from other GM brands. However, GM and other foreign automakers were forced to close their Indian operations by a socialist government in the early 1950s.
GM restarted Chevrolet sales in India in the 1990s with the Opel-sourced Astra and Corsa and has since added other models from GM-Daewoo and a locally developed utility vehicle called the Tavera.
Though GM still sells Daewoo branded vehicles in South Korea, most of the models built there are now exported as Chevrolets.
Current GMI future model launch plans include a INR4 lakh (400,000; $US8,200; EUR5,900) minicar later this year.
The Indian unit has a 4% market share and hopes to achieve 10% growth in 2009, despite a fall in sales in the first five months of this year. GMI sold 65,702 cars and SUVs in India last year, up 9.5% year on year.
