In conversation with Mr. Ajay Raghuvanshi, VP, Nissan India

Nissan Safety Driving Forum - Nissan India’s safety initiative to educate people about safe driving; reaches Jaipur today.  Mr. Ajay Raghuvanshi, VP,  Sales & Marketing was there to inaugurate the initiative in the city. We have got a chance for a brief discussion about the initiative and Nissan’s future strategies.

Q.1 First of all, Nissan Safety Driving Forum is a very good initiative. We liked all the simulators and information provided by Nissan’s professional team. Will you please explain a bit more about it?

The Nissan Safety Driving Forum helps drivers as well as passengers to reflect on their perception of safety while driving. We at Nissan follow our global vision to not only develop exciting and innovative products, but also to enrich peoples’ lives through sustainable social developments of which NSDF is a shining example.

Our aim and conviction is to educate people on road safety through tangible methods like simulators, not just in theory. In this phase, we have increased the number of cities for reach. We have invested Rs. 13 crore in NSDF in India so far.

Q.2 How’s the festive season going for Nissan India?

We are doing good business and as we are having relatively updated products including Nissan Terrano, Sunny, Micra and Datsun GO, we are hoping a substantial growth.  September went well and despite several vacations we did well. We are hoping an even better October! I am expecting 30 per cent better sales than September.

Q.3 Nissan is one of youngest brands in India, therefore there are lot off scope for network expansion. What is your strategy for the same?

Currently we are having 130 dealerships across India and every dealership has a service station. We are planning to expand this to 200 dealerships by the end of 2014-15. Our target is to maximize our reach in top-20 cities. However as Datsun targets tier-2 & tier-3 cities, we also want to expand our footprints in these cities as well.

Q.4 Utility Vehicle segment in India is on boom and Nissan is also doing quite well with Terrano, but the other UV - Evalia’s sales figures are not that exciting. What is the reason behind it? 

Sometimes, the needs of buyers from a particular product change during product’s development process. That is what happened with Evalia, but Nissan went to the buyers, listen to them and made changes to the Evalia. The MPV now comes with roof mounted AC, sliding rear windows and pilot seats; all were suggested by the targeted buyers. So, we are hoping that Evalia will soon beat the initial perception and will perform well.

Q.5 We have seen a shift of interest, Nissan discontinued both X-Trail and 370Z, can you explain the strategy behind it?

Both X-Trail and 370Z were being imported as CBUs (Completely Built Unit), therefore the cost of the products were quite high due to import duties. We have a manufacturing facility available in Chennai and want to focus on locally manufactured products.

Q.6 We all were waiting for the Datsun Go+ during the festive season any possibilities of the launch in 2014?

We were also planning to launch the product in October, but we couldn’t schedule the production due to some reasons. However, we are not farer from the launch and you can expect the vehicle by early, 2015.

Q.7 Renault launched Duster AWD recently; can we expect Terrano 4X4 anytime soon?

We don’t have any immediate plan for Terrano 4X4, not for next 6 months.