Perusahaan Otomobil Kedua, which produces Perodua brand compact cars in a joint venture with Toyota’s minicar unit Daihatsu Motor, is confident of achieving this year’s sales target despite the parts supply disruption due to the 11 March earthquake/tsunami in Japan.
”We are still upbeat on meeting our 195,000 sales target for 2011 as we believe that production will be back to normal much earlier than anticipated. Production will be ramped up in the coming months to make up for the shortfalls,” the managing director Aminar Rashid Salleh told Kyodo News.
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The Perodua brand is the top seller in Malaysia. In the first quarter of this year, 45,700 units were sold, for market share of 29%. Perodua’s vehicles are closely modeled after Daihatsu’s. Malaysia is Daihatsu’s biggest market outside Japan, according to Aminar.
Aminar said that for Perodua, a total of 23 engine components and accessories such as the electronic control units, brake systems and electronic automatic transmission systems have been affected by the Japan ‘quake.
But the plant is still operating and the company is on track to launch a new model in the coming months, he said.
He said the company’s Japanese vendors managed to recover much earlier than expected, and coupled with the fact that Perodua sourced 90% of its parts locally, operations are on track to be back to normal ”either in June or July,” he said.
Aminar added that together with Daihatsu, Perodua plans to manufacture automatic transmissions in Malaysia.
Construction of the plant, estimated to cost up to 250m ringgit (about US$83.3m), is expected to begin by the fourth quarter of this year, with production beginning a year later, he said.
