The proportion of production and sales does not match Maruti Suzuki. The company is facing an acute shortage of production to meet the demand for its cars. The situation is likely to go along till 2012, as the sale projection for 2010 is expected to increase by 10% from the volume of one million in 2009. The derivation implies that the company has to increase the capacity by 1 lakh cars from its plant, which is undergoing with full capacity.
The Chairman of Maruti is too honest to assert the situation and the technicians in the company are trying their best to boost the production by various means. But the situation will not be normalized before 2012, he said. According to the existing situation the supply will not meet any hiccup this year but 2011-12 would be more prone to delivery problem. The only option to recover from this situation, according to the Chairman, is to put the manual lines. The Executive Officer(Marketing) for Maruti said the company is on the verge of rationalizing, renovating and debottlenecking in Gurgaon plant.
The move is to press for optimal use of the plant for getting the maximum output, he said. Maruti has two plants- Gurgaon and Manesar- with the installed capacity of 800000 cars. However, the engineers of the company are too rapid to deliver one million cars this year indicating the capacity utilization of the units to 125%. The Manesar plant is to undergo the increased capacity by 250000 before 2012, despite the claim that both units might produce 1.1 million cars during this FY.
The company is brooding over the pending delivery of some of its cars especially Dzire, which has a waiting period of 3-4 months. Similar is the case with the newly launched Eeco. Swift comes next with the wait of minimum 2 months. The company is under pressure as it has not expected such a tremendous demand. To ease the dependency on European countries, Maruti is diluting the export potential. Already, it has inked a pact with Nissan for delivering 35000 Star-A (for Nissan it is Pixo) for this year. Industry experts view the situation of Maruti as highly competitive due to the increased presence of global players like GM, Nissan and Ford in small car segment.