Magneti Marelli, the Italian auto component maker owned by Fiat has inaugurated its new plant to manufacture AMT (Automated Manual Transmission) gearboxes. The plant is located at Manesar.
The new plant is situated on an area of 7,500 square metres and has a maximum capacity of 280,000 units in a year. The plant has already started manufacturing of AMT gearboxes in July and is currently producing 120,000 units annually.
Magneti Marelli has released a statement saying ” “This facility has been created to address the growing market success that the AMT component has had in India over the past two years and to meet the demand from local car makers regarding additional future implementations,” The company also added that it has invested Rs 150 crore in the manufacturing of the new plant. When fully operational, the plant is expected to employ around 115 people.
“This plant is one of its kind in India. We are probably the only manufacturer in India to have put up a separate plant for automated forms of transmission, AMT is one of them,” said Saju Mookken, Country Manager & MD, Magneti Marelli India. “Not only India, we could also look at supplying other markets as well, if and when the supplies from Italy get saturated.”
Mookken added that at present, 4 to 5 percent of the passenger vehicle market in India has automatic transmission solutions, more than 50 percent of which is AMT. “We expect the overall automatic solution market to shoot up to 30 percent by 2020,” he said.
Magneti Marelli says that it had sold more than 50,000 units of the AMT gearbox in 2014 and the plant is manufacturing almost double the units it has sold in India last year as of now.
Magneti Marelli currently supplies the AMT gearbox to Maruti for the Celerio and Alto K10 and to Tata Motors for the Zest and Tata Nano
