It is from this new plant in Pune that Beiqi Foton Motor plans to manufacture LCVs and MCVs for India. It has now emerged that Foton is showing probable customers (existing owners of Maruti Ertiga, Toyota Innova etc), two new cars. One of these is Maruti Ertiga rival and the other is a Force Motor Traveller rival.
Foton is currently undertaking customer surveys in major Indian cities and showing them finer details of these two cars via computer generated slides. Speaking about the Maruti Ertiga rival from Foton Motor, this will be launched with a 1.4l petrol engine which will deliver mileage of 15+ kmpl. If Foton does go ahead with it’s launch, they are planning on a price tag of Rs 5.30 lakh. Not much details about the other car were revealed, as only the interiors were shown. From what was told to us by a person close to the development, that these cars will have much more space than anything offered currently in the market.
Foton being the parent company has 10 major brands under its gambit which include Auman, Auv, Aumark, MP-X, Midi, Saga, View, SUP, Ollin and Forland. The company has signed a MoU with the Government of Maharashtra and an investment of INR 1,676 crores has been pumped into this new plant from where the company will launch itself in an ever increasing commercial vehicle market in India which stands at the fourth largest in the world and is slated to increase by leaps and bounds.
Besides its China operations, where Beiqi Foton Motor has a total of 14 plants, they also have operations in Russia, Iran, Pakistan, Vietnam, Indonesia and Kenya from where the company exports their range of commercial vehicles to over 100 countries across the world. The company has extensive plans of adding five manufacturing bases outside china and is targeting emerging markets and developed markets to include North America, Europe and Japan by 2020.
