Global auto giant Nissan has not performed very well in India and this has prompted Nissan to seriously reconsider it’s strategy for India. As part of it’s future plans for the country, the manufacturer has announced that it will stop production of the Nissan Micra at Renault-Nissan’s Chennai facility to make space for newer, more India-centric models. They will also stop the sales of the Micra hatchback for the export market once the new generation is released and the production will shift to it’s manufacturing facility in France.
The Nissan Micra replacement will be based on the CMF or the Common Module Family architecture that was announced last year and will underpin several other models including some from Datsun and Renault. High levels of platform sharing will keep costs in check and the first CMF based product is expected to be launched in 2015 by Datsun called the Redi-GO which will be positioned below the GO hatchback. Renault is also expected to launch a CMF based product followed by the launch of the Nissan Micra replacement.
The Micra replacement for India and other such markets and the next-gen Nissan Micra might share the same platform but are expected to be very different in terms of styling, interior space, size and features with Nissan catering to Indian needs as much as possible. We also expect Nissan to drop the Micra moniker for India and launch the car with a completely different identity possibly in a bid to start afresh.
Nissan hasn’t tasted much success in the India and currently holds a market share of just 3% as the Nissan Micra didn’t bring in the expected numbers and the sales of the Sunny have also been heading south. Also, the Datsun GO hasn’t been selling anywhere close to what the company had expected. The company has been doing some major rethinking and plans to expand it’s dealer network to 300 from the current 128 locations by 2016. If Nissan gets things right this time around then they can easily increase their market share but we’ll have to wait to see how things unfold and if Nissan’s fortunes in India change or not.
