Motorcycle assembling in Bangladesh by a joint initiative of Honda Motor Company and the Bangladesh Steel and Engineering Corporation is going to begin in September aiming to tap a good share of the market in the country, officials concerned said.
Motorcycles assembled by the joint venture will hit the market very soon just after the beginning of assembling, they said.
In September 2012, the BSEC and Honda Motor Company, Japan’s biggest motorcycle manufacturer, had signed an agreement to establish a joint venture to initially assemble and later manufacture motorcycles by the end of December last year and formed a joint venture company named Bangladesh Honda Private Ltd.
‘The board of directors of the company has already met twice, latest in the first week of May, to finalise a concrete plan to start assembling and then manufacturing,’ Shaik Md Mobarak Hossain, director of the company, told New Age on Saturday.
According to the plan, the company will assemble 10,000 motorcycles in the first year, 35,000 in the second year and 70,000 in the third year, and then begin producing instead of merely assembling.
Mobarak said after successful completion of three years of assembling, the plant would go for production and manufacturing of 1,00,000 motorcycles per year.
The company has already rented a building to be used as an assembling workshop at Maona in Gazipur and renovation works of the plant will start in June, he said.
Thereafter, the plant will be shifted to a suitable location owned by the BSEC after completion of the necessary infrastructure development work.
By this time, he said, the company would complete other procedures including getting approval from the Board of Investment, Bangladesh Securities and Exchange Commission and Bangladesh Road Transport Authority to go into operation.
Md Ataur Rahman, chairman of the BSEC, was made the chairman and Yoichi Mizutani, manager of the Motorcycle Sales Division of Honda, was made the managing director of the company while two directors were nominated by Honda and one by the BSEC.
The initial paid-up capital of the company is Tk 61 crore, and Honda will own 70 per cent of the shares of the company.
The company was supposed to start motorcycle assembling by December last year. ‘But we could not do that due mainly to procedural delay and in absence of board of directors meeting,’ an official said.
He said the prices of Honda motorcycles in Bangladesh would be competitive and a little bit lower compared with other motorcycles being assembled and manufactured in the country.
According to the company plan, it will primarily assemble 80cc and 100cc motorcycles to meet the domestic demand.
According to Honda’s calculation, the sales of motorcycles in Bangladesh reached 1,80,000 units in 2011 with 11 per cent growth, and the steady growth of the market is expected to continue.
-With New Age input
