Nissan's Duster could be last product from Nissan-Renault Cross-badging

We all know that Renault and Nissan India are sharing platforms, design and technology for their vehicles. Sunny/Scala and Micra/Pulse are the evident for the same. For quite sometime, these vehicles couldn't manage to generate sales volumes for their manufacturers. Speaking on the same Kenichero Yomura, president of Nissan's India operations said that both the companies are likely to discontinue the strategy of sharing models in the country.

According to the SIAM (Society of Indian Automobile manufacturers), sales of the Micra hatch came down by 39 per cent in the last year to 11,449 units sold from previous 18,633 units. However, the Pulse launched quite later, and its sales rose to 5,800 units from 1,993. Yomura further added that sharing of technologies and platforms was essential to achieve cost competitiveness. In near future, both the companies would develop their products individually. However, he denied to comment on the sharing of Duster platform for the Nissan's upcoming compact SUV.

Sharing platform is not something new to India, we had seen Volkswagen Group fully owned Skoda Auto India and Volkswagen India sharing similar platform for the VW Vento and the Skoda Rapid models. “India is a very competitive market, and we came in late,” Yomura said. “In order to be cost competitive we needed to be a big volume player from the beginning. We shared products with Renault and both companies sell products in domestic and export (market). By doing that we achieved big volumes in three years. But we will not see the cross-badged models. It was only for the beginning not anymore”, said Yomura.

In order to increase market share in the Indian auto market, the Japanese auto giant is planning to launch at least four new products in the country this financial year. A compact sports utility vehicle, next-generation Micra hatch and refreshes of other models are the part of the company's strategy for this year. The company aims to increase its sales volume to 100,000 units by the end of the current fiscal, last fiscal Nissan sold around 37,000 units in India.

Source : Livemint

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