Yamaha Motor India is all set to open its new manufacturing plant in Chennai with an installed capacity of 400,000 units early next month. The new facility, which will start product in CY15, will roll out the 113cc Alpha scooter initially and gradually start producing other scooters.

The company, which sold around 450,000 two-wheelers in CY13, is targeting sales of 600,000 units in this calendar year. Export sales last year were 200,000  in 2013 and the same number is likely to be maintained this year.

Like its scooter-making rivals in India, Yamaha remains bullish on the scooter segment which has recorded close to 30 percent growth in CY14 thus far.

Commenting on the growth in the scooter segment, Masaki Asano, managing director of the company, said that there is a big shift happening in the market as customers are preferring scooters over bikes as well as female riders are increasingly prefer scooters since they offer a lot of convenience. He also said that Yamaha is looking to expand its touchpoints from the present of 1,200 to 2,000 by next year.

Without offering any timeline, he said the company aims to achieve a 10 percent market share in the Indian two-wheeler industry; currently as per SIAM data it has a 3.68 percent market share in the overall two-wheeler segment (April-August 2014) with sales of 243,028 units. In the scooter segment it has 5.79 percent market share with sales of 101,517 units in the first five months of the year.  

Masaki Asano was speaking after felicitating Meenakshi Sundaram Subramanian from Madurai, Tamil Nadu who won the sixth Yamaha World Technician Grand Prix 2014 (WTGP) title held in Japan earlier this month. Subramanian emerges as the world’s number one technician among 33,000 participants from 18 countries.

Photograph: The Alpha will be the first scooter to roll out of the new Chennai plant.