Ford India is pushing for locally-developed products that suit the Indian consumer's needs in a bid to crack the country's car market. Despite entering the country 20 years ago, Ford has not been able to successfully stamp its mark, leave alone making a dent in competitors' market share.
Until Thursday's launch of Freestyle, Ford was banking on its global products to become bestsellers in India. The EcoSport for instance was developed outside country and became the largest-selling model for Ford.
"A few years ago, only limited amount of work used to happen in India and today its more than 50 percent. I would be surprised if we don't do more and more work out of India," said Ford India president and managing director Anurag Mehrotra.
Ford India domestic sales declined nearly 1.5 percent to 90,061 units last year as compared to FY17, as per data shared by the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers. The fall came despite a rise of 8 percent clocked by the industry during last year.
Its share has come down to 2.7 percent even as production has been diverted to exports to sustain operations in India. Exports grew by 14 percent to 181,148 units last year against a dip of 1.5 percent clocked by the industry.
A major reason behind this lacklustre performance has been lack of locally developed products, a model used very effectively by Maruti Suzuki, Hyundai and Renault. In addition to the EcoSport, Ford sells Figo, Aspire and Endeavour. Its also sells the Mustang performance car in limited numbers.
Going ahead, Ford intends to increase the involvement of its local research and development team to churn out products that are tailormade to run on Indian road conditions. More than 50 percent of the development work of Freestyle was done in India.
"We had said that we would invest USD 190 million in an R&D centre. Over the last 18 months, the India product development team has grown around 800-1,000 people and we have plans to grow it further," Mehrotra said.
"More than 50 percent of the Freestyle's work was done in India. So they have been doing 'limited edition' products for us and as the capabilities get built up we will see more and more involvement from them," Mehrotra added.
When asked if Ford will look to have a fully India-developed product in the future Mehrotra added, "Ford always works in a distributed model. Each center has its own excellence. For instance its does not make sense to have multiple design studios in Asia Pacific. So our design centre is based out of Australia. How you use those capabilities becomes a critical factor".
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