Maruti Shifts DZire Production to Gurgaon

CHANCHAL PAL CHAUHAN NEW DELHI

    In the first step to de-risk its operations, country’s largest carmaker Maruti Suzuki is shifting the production of its highest-selling DZire sedan to its older Gurgaon facility from its current Manesar plant.
DZire is India’s largest-selling sedan and the fifth-most sold car after hatchbacks like Alto, WagonR, i10 and Swift. The car has been a runaway success since its launch in 2008 with customers waiting almost six months for delivery and now, will roll out from the relatively-safer Gurgaon plant that has escaped any major industrial dispute in the past decade.
Maruti will carry out some layout changes at its Gurgaon plant, where it started production of its cars in India way back in 1983, to start pumping out metal sheets in its press shop, to carve out body shells for DZire where aging but best-selling cars like Alto, WagonR, Estilo, Eeco, Ritz as well as the much older Omni and Gypsy models are also made.
“There are some changes in the production plan that would be carried from next week onwards, where Dzire is being shifted from Manesar to the Gurgaon plant. The Swift will continue to be manufactured at Manesar plant,” a Maruti spokesman said.
The Gurgaon plant manufactured bulk of the 12.73-lakh cars that were produced in the last fiscal, while a little over 3 lakh cars of these were rolled out of the Manesar plant. The change comes after the company faced a major production hassle with the 13-day workers’ strike at Manesar plant in June, which had brought production of its high-selling cars like Swift and DZire to a grinding halt and threw its entire manufacturing cycle into a tailspin. The fallout of the strike has been the pretty serious with Maruti losing out hugely on its in-demand cars that are currently manufactured at its Manesar plant only.
The Gurgaon plant had produced Swift in the past, but few months ago, the company shifted the entire production of the hatchback and its sedan sibling DZire to Manesar. The company had optimised production by rolling out specific cars from its different production lines at Gurgaon and Manesar. Now, as per the new plan, while DZire will be made at Gurgaon only, Swift, which is due for a makeover with some minor changes, will be produced at Manesar only along with other cars like Sx4 and A-Star.