Tata Motors to invest $625 mn to up sales
Tata Motors will invest more than ₹4,000 crore ($625 million) to boost sales of its passenger and commercial vehicles, its chief executive said on Monday, as the automaker looks to return to profit in its domestic business.
The company has committed to invest ₹2,500 crore in its car unit and will pump more than ₹1,500 crore into its trucks and bus business this year and annually over coming years, CEO Guenter Butschek said.
Tata Motors, maker of the lossmaking Nano small car, will focus on reducing costs, launching new products and ramping up production volumes over the next six to nine months as part of its turnaround plan, Butschek said.
“To return to overall profitability is what we have given ourselves as the ultimate objective for the year 2017/18,” Butschek said.
Tata Motors, owner of British luxury brands Jaguar and Land Rover, has been trying to turn around its loss-making domestic unit by modernising products, improving efficiency, cutting costs and streamlining its organisation and supplier base.
The automaker, which has 5.5% share of the passenger vehicles market, has struggled to boost sales in a country where rivals Maruti Suzuki and Hyundai Motor have cornered twothirds of the market.
Earlier this month it ended talks with Germany’s Volkswagen Group to jointly develop a car for India and other emerging markets over technical issues.
In February Tata Motors launched the TAMO sub-brand to test new technologies and help it become more responsive to changing market trends.