[Rajeevraj]

Magneti Marelli inaugurates its new plant for AMT, to employ 115 when fully operational

Magneti Marelli, the Italian auto component major, officially inaugurated its new plant for manufacturing automated manual transmission in Manesar. With this, the total number of plants that Magneti Marelli has in India goes up to 11.

The new plant, situated on an area of 7,500 square metres, has a maximum capacity of 280,000 units in a year. The plant has already started manufacturing of AMT in July and is currently producing 120,000 units annually.

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 carmakers regarding additional future implementations," the company said in a statement.

Currently Magneti Marelli supplies its AMT solution to Maruti Suzuki for Celerio and Alto K10, and Tata Motors for Tata Zest and Nano.

The company said 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. Magneti Marelli, across all its plants in India, employs around 2300 people.

Till now, Magneti Marelli was importing AMT from its plant in Italy. However, the company said it will continue importing AMT's from its Italy plant to meet the demand in Indian market.

"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 informed 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 said that it had sold more than 50,000 units of AMT in 2014. Even with the current utilisation, the plant is manufacturing almost double the units it has sold in India last year.

"If you look at the market for automatics it was just one percent a few years back, and it has already reached 5 percent. I hope the demand for AMT will continue to grow, said Mookken. "The point is the carmakers who have tested the products, will test on more products and other carmakers will also enter this arena. So, we created a capacity which we believe is the right one for the mid-term."

The company has said that it will double its revenues from India in the next three years and hopes AMT segment to be one of the main contributors towards this. In 2014, the company generated a revenue of Rs 1300 crore.

Source: ETAuto

[Karthik Chandra]

With 2 lac units sold every month, the Indian auto industry does about 25 lacs units a year. IMO Magneti Marelli's target of 2 lac units a year is a humble one. That's about 8% of the yearly volume. Automatic penetration after the AMT has been rapidly increasing. Its good since this will pave way for more diesel options in the sub 10 lac segment which currently has only 2, the Zest and the TUV 300

[Aditya]

Magneti Marelli inaugurates new AMT manufacturing facility in India. Posts moved to a new thread.

[GTO]

Fantastic news - this is huge! The low-cost fuel-efficient AMTs are a perfect solution for our budget cars. Beauty is, you can slap on an AMT on any car overnight (vis a vis developing a new conventional AT gearbox for each specific engine which takes years).

Having its plant here gives Magneti a competitive advantage over other AMT manufacturers. It'll also keep the costs in check (though Maruti has kept the premium very reasonable) and bring down any waiting periods on new launches.

[hybridpetrol]

Originally Posted by GTO

Having its plant here gives Magneti a competitive advantage over other AMT manufacturers. It'll also keep the costs in check (though Maruti has kept the premium very reasonable) and bring down any waiting periods on new launches.

Will that actually bring the prices of AMT cars down any times sooner for the car buyer?
Currently Celerio charges a premium of 50K for each variant with AMT box.
(Lxi - 3.97L, Lxi AMT - 4.47L; Vxi - 4.27L, Vxi AMT - 4.77L).

If the boxes are for diesel engine, the premium is more - About 75K.
Zest XM - 6.61L, XMA - 7.31L; XT - 7.37L, XTA - 8.13L
TUV3OO T6 Plus - 7.88L, T6 Plus AMT - 8.6L
(All prices ex-showroom)

While other gearboxes are available at a premium of about 1L, I do not consider the AMT to be very cheap either.

With the availability of the gearbox increases, they should correspondingly reduce the prices of the AT vehicles. The popularity of AT cars in India will only increase when the AT cars are available just within 25K premium of their MT counterparts, and there should be an AT box on all available variants (not just on one trim)
When manufacturers such as Maruti, Tata, Mahindra - those who use AMT in their cars provide AMTs in all versions they release - automatically we will also see other manufacturers provide better gearboxes in all their versions at lesser premiums charged.
Consider this: If DSG gearbox is available at 50K or lesser, what more one can ask? (Ford charges 1L premium for Dual Clutch transmission on its 1.5L Di-VCT Titanium over the MT)

[pradkumar]

I wish Jatco would set up shop here. They have been talking about it for quite some years now. I think they have abandoned plans and are thinking of an R&D centre in India.

http://www.jatco.co.jp/ENGLISH/index.html

The modern JATCO was formed after Nissan spun off its AT/CVT (automatic transmission/continuously variable transmission) development divisions and its Fuji manufacturing plant into a company called TransTechnology, Ltd in June 1999.TransTechnology Ltd. and JATCO Corp., both affiliates of Nissan, agreed to merge in October 1999 to become JATCO TransTechnology Ltd. JATCO was established in 1970 to manufacture automatic transmissions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jatco

Pradeep

[Aditya]

Earlier this year, Tata Motors introduced an automated manual transmission (AMT) version of the Nano. The car is fitted with an imported AMT unit, manufactured by Italian company, Magneti Marelli.

The AMT variant of the Nano has turned out to be popular and accounts for about 40% of the total demand for the car. However, the supply of AMT kits has not been strong enough to match the demand and as a result, there is a waiting period for the car. Tata Motors is planning to localise AMT kits in the next calendar year in an attempt to reduce the waiting period.

With the company planning to equip more models with AMT, localisation of these kits will definitely help in the long run.

The demand for AMT-equipped vehicles has been strong in India. The Maruti Suzuki Celerio, which was launched in February 2014, was the first car to use this technology. Maruti went on to equip other budget cars in its line-up (Alto K10 & WagonR) with this technology. The Zest diesel was the first car from Tata Motors to get an AMT. Mahindra has also stepped into the scene with an AMT-equipped version of the TUV300 and Renault is expected to launch an AMT version of the Kwid hatchback in the coming months.

Source: Deccan Herald

[hybridpetrol]

This is good for the Automatic penetration in our country!
Though AT is getting popular in the recent years, still manuals dominate in large numbers, primarily because of awareness and the perceived difference in cost.
In western countries, for majority of the models sold, a manual transmission trim is not available at all, due to the ease of using automatic.
Localization of AMT is one step that will take us towards such a day when even in India, our buying pattern leans towards automatic.