Nissan Motor Co Ltd and Malaysia’s Tan
Chong Motor Holdings Bhd will jointly produce several thousand small
passenger cars and pickup trucks annually in the Southeast Asian
country.
Nissan will become the biggest carmaker
so far to start production in Myanmar. Other automakers, such as Japan’s
Suzuki, announced earlier this year that it would restart production
here, while U.S.-based Ford has said it would open a showroom here.
The world’s sixth largest automaker has
been granted approval by the Myanmar authorities to build a factory that
would assemble cars for the domestic market using parts manufactured
elsewhere, the Financial Times reported on Thursday.
“We appreciate all the support we have received from the Myanmar government,” a Nissan spokesman was quoted as saying in the FT.
Nissan is still finalising details of
the plan with all related parties. A formal announcement, including
details of the scale of the investment, is expected to be made today
during its chief executive Carlos Ghosn’s visit to Myanmar, alongside
executives from Tan Chong Motors, Nissan’s Malaysian business partner,
according to the FT.
A Tan Chong affiliate will likely
construct an assembly plant in one of the industrial zones in Yangon
that will finish cars using parts shipped from Nissan factories in
Southeast Asia and elsewhere.
It was reported earlier that Nissan had
given Tan Chong sole and exclusive rights to distribute CBU Nissan
vehicles in the country. At present, a sales and service centre has been
opened in Yangon, and is selling imported pickups and large commercial
vans.
According to the earlier report,
distribution of Nissan cars in the emerging market was expected to
commence in the third quarter of 2013, with a projected sales volume of
about 300 units per year.
Besides Tan Chong, which has already
begun a joint venture with Nissan, other Malaysian companies are closely
looking at the opportunities to enter Myanmar.
“There is a huge potential in Myanmar’s
market. There are many opportunities there. Since it is part of ASEAN,
there are a lot of similarities between Myanmar and Malaysia. Malaysian
automobile companies are also interested in doing business there,” Wong
Lai Sum, chief executive officer of the Malaysia External Trade
Development Corporation (MATRADE), told Eleven Media.
Meanwhile, another Japanese automaker,
Mazda Motor Corp., will soon start selling its new vehicles in Myanmar,
Reuters reported on Thursday, quoting its chief executive officer
Masamichi Kogai.
Established in 1920, Mazda Motor Corp.
had a partnership with the Ford Motor Company from 1979 to 2010. In
2007, Mazda produced almost 1.3 million vehicles for global sales, the
majority of which (nearly 1 million) were produced in the company’s
Japanese plants, with the remainder coming from a variety of other
plants worldwide. In 2011, Mazda was the fifteenth biggest automaker by
production worldwide.
source: Eleven Myanmar
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