General Motors wants to increase sales in Indonesia five times by 2014 when its revived factory will be producing at full capacity of 40,000 vehicles a year, the head of local operations has said.
“We are definitely going to go from a small sales and marketing company to a design-and-build-where-you-sell company that has sales in the (tens of thousands a year),” GM Indonesia president director Marcos Purty told Reuters.
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General Motors last month said it would restart production at its assembly plant in Bekasi, some 50km east of Indonesia’s capital Jakarta, in early 2013.
The company plans to spend US$150m modernising and expanding the plant, to produce a new compact MPV to be sourced from its GMDAT subsidiary in South Korea.
Capacity at the plant, which ceased production in 2005, will be increased to 40,000 units per year and employ 800 people.
Martin Apfel, president of GM’s Southeast Asia operations, said the plant would produce vehicles for export to other markets in the region. Local content will exceed 40%, which will give the vehicles duty-free access to the main markets in the ASEAN trade block.
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By GlobalDataPurty said the majority of the minvans would be sold in Indonesia, where sales jumped 58% last year.
GM’s sales in Indonesia, limited to the Chevrolet brand, last year rose 72% to a paltry 4,500, giving it less than 1% of the market.
Purty told Reuters he did not have a specific sales volume or market share in mind as GM prepares to launch a vehicle in the popular multipurpose vehicle (MPV) market. But he acknowledged that with at least half the output bound for the local market and more models, including a truck, to be introduced over the next year, sales should reach at least 25,000 by 2014.
Toyota is also expanding in Indonesia. Last week its Daihatsu unit announced a second plant.
