Consistent long-term policy is must for development in auto sector to ensure further investment towards expansion of existing OEMs and attract new entrants in order to generate employment opportunities, billions of rupees of investment ventures and substantial share of revenues for national exchequer, this was stated by DG Pakistan Automotive Manufacturers Association Abdul Waheed while having a discussion with the media here on Friday.
"While appreciating government's decision on used car policy, the industry's request to the government is to focus on long-term benefits in its policy to get fruitful results in future", he said. The three significant OEMs Pak Suzuki, Honda and Toyota alone invested over Rs 20 billion during last 4 years. Their total capacity increased by over 100 percent during the last 5 years and currently as a matter of fact the industry is utilising only half of the capacity as the demand has substantially decreased.
He said that with the enhancement in capacity by OEM'S a number of allied sectors such as vendors of auto parts, paints suppliers, leather manufacturers, also had to increase their capacities by investing million's of rupees. This also created more jobs, however, due to the downturn in the industry over the last few years these vendors have put on hold their investments and huge lay off's have been made. With consistency in the policies aimed towards a common goal of auto industry development as envisaged in AIDP, the industry can further flourish, from its current levels.
Raza Ansari, Director Marketing, Indus Motor Corporation (IMC) speaking on the occasion said that the local OEMs have been working aggressively on Auto Industry Development Programme (AIDP) to bridge the supply and demand gap at the local level which currently has been reduced to zero and the locally produced cars of IMC are available on the floors at its dealer network.-PR