Ford India growth to remain flat in ‘08

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Chennai, Dec 25: Ford India expects growth to be flat this year. “The high interest rates and overall slowdown in the automobile industry have cast a shadow in the company’s growth in the current year,” said Arvind Mathew, managing director, Ford India.

Speaking to the FE recently, he said: “Except the first quarter, the remaining three quarters have been affected particularly by sharp increase in the interest rates.”

According to the available information, the company had reported a sharp growth during last year with a sales of over 42,000 cars.

Arvind Mathew said that the ongoing crisis in the US economy has affected the interest rates in India and if the trend continues further, the sales growth in the next year too will remain same. Despite good response to all our products, particularly to

Fiesta and Endeavour, the company sees that the higher interest rates will remain to be the biggest problem, he added.

Responding to a query, he said

Endeavour has been doing extremely well and now suffers from capacity constraint. The company will look out ways to break the bottlenecks to have higher volumes. Currently the company is producing 250-300 Endeavours a month, he said further.

On the export front, he said the company started exporting Fiesta to South Africa from September onwards and it is doing well. “We expect to export 10,000 cars during next year, including Ikons,” he said.