Suzuki recently celebrated 25 years of car production at its Maruti Suzuki plant in India. Maruti Suzuki (formerly known as Maruti Udyog Limited) was established as a Government Company back in 1981, and in December 1983, India’s first affordable world-class car, the Maruti 800, rolled off the production line at Gurgaon near Delhi.

This started a phenomenon and began to make the Indian consumer’s dream of owning a car come true. Prior to this time, the Indian automobile industry was dominated by just one or two brand names and offered little choice. Today, Suzuki has a 54 per cent share of the Indian passenger car market and manufacturing there accounts for 35 per cent of Suzuki’s global car production.

The Maruti plant produced more than 770,000 units last year and for the first time Suzuki sold more cars in India than in its home market Japan. There are currently seven million Suzukis on Indian roads – of which three million are Altos – out of a total of 11 million passenger cars in use.

A second plant at Manesar was commissioned in early 2007 with an initial annual capacity of 100,000 vehicles and the scope to increase to 300,000 units in the future. This plant is the global production base for Suzuki’s fifth strategic model, the Alto, which will be launched in the UK in March with emissions of just 103g/km and low fuel consumption of 62.8mpg on the combined cycle.

Suzuki builds an average of three cars every minute in India, employs 7,100 people and has a network of 600 dealers in 393 towns and cities as well as 2,628 authorised repairers covering 1,220 conurbations.