Nissan to focus on premium models, unveils luxury SUV Kicks

The domestic unit of the Japanese aut0maker Nissan Thursday unveiled a luxury sports utility vehicle (SUV) 'Kicks' in its bid to revive the sagging fortunes in a market where it has been a fringe player even after almost a decade of presence.

Nissan operates through two brands in the country.

While its sells the Micra, Micra Active, Sunny, Terrano and GT-R under the Nissan label, its small cars Go and Go+ and redi-GO are marketed under its sister brand Datsun.

But both these labels have so far failed to gross volumes in the highly price-sensitive domestic market.

The new India-specific Kicks, the details of which is yet to be revealed, will be commercially launched in January, said Thomas Kuehl, president, Nissan India Operations.

As part of its Move 2022 global strategy, the Japanese auto major is looking to "fix" its India operations along with Saudi Arabia, where it has made significant investments but hasn't had much success.

Besides, the company is also aiming to more than double its dealership networks over the next three years from 272 at present, he said.

"We are excited and proud to unveil the Kicks, which is a testimony to our commitment to this market. As a part of our India strategy, we will bring in the best of our global products and technologies to our customers here," Kuehl said.

The company is kicking off a new strategy here, Kuehl said, adding the new offering will be the their core model for this market as it goes into the next phase of product offensive a premium for a positioning.

"We will bring in our global strength (in terms of products) to India. This was something that we did not do before," he admitted.

Nissan currently has a minuscule 1.13 per cent market share in the passenger car segment, while it's a negligible 0.68 per cent in the utility vehicles segment.

Going forward, Nissan will focus on the premium SUV segment here and will have a proper line-up with all its global strength, he said.

"We have learnt our lessons in the past four years.

And that is why we have come out with the Move 2022 strategy.

We've a very distinctive strategy for both the Nissan and Datsun brands," he said.

The company had last week unveiled updated variants of Go and Go+ as part of its strategy to take the Datsun brand to small towns.

"We came into practically in a very competitive segment with two major players dominating...and by only focusing on the me-too rather than having our own identity and our own differentiation," he said.

Nissan this time round just does not want to come to a segment but want to be a dominant player here, challenging the market, Kuehl said.

He said the company will start its B2B e-vehicle business here from the March quarter before entering into the mass market.

(This article has not been edited by Zeebiz editorial team and is auto-generated from an agency feed.)