IFAD Autos gearing up to enter luxury bus assembly segment

safari2021 · Mar 8, 2021

IFAD Autos is all set to make a foray into the assembling business as it is now putting together different components to build 160 luxury buses to cater to the domestic market.

"We have been assembling commercial vehicles in our Tk 300 crore plant in Dhamrai since 2017 and we began assembling luxury buses last year," said Taskeen Ahmed, managing director of the company.

Of the 48,126 air-conditioned and non-air-conditioned buses registered with the Bangladesh Road Transport Authority as of February, around 10,000 units were sold by IFAD Autos, occupying 21 per cent of the total market, he said.

Since 1988, IFAD Autos has been distributing commercial vehicles of India's leading automobile manufacturer Ashok Leyland. So far, the company has sold over 60,000 such vehicles.

Ashok Leyland has been providing technical support to the 125-bigha plant of IFAD Autos, which will create a total of 800 jobs, including 500 for mechanical and electrical engineers and technical persons.

"We hope we will be able to meet the quality standards set by Ashok Leyland," Ahmed said.

Nurul Majid Mahmud Humayun, industries minister, hoped the plant will help in building a bigger market for the local automobile component makers and give a boost to the domestic light engineering sector.

He spoke after opening IFAD's luxury bus assembling unit on the premises of the plant yesterday.

"The demand for luxury buses has been increasing thanks to their growing popularity among the general mass for safe and comfortable travels," Ahmed said.

In the last six years, around 3,000 units of buses have been sold on an average every year, and 600 of them were air-conditioned ones, he said.

IFAD Autos believes around 1,000 units of AC buses will be sold a year in the next three years.

An increasing number of automobile retailers are now setting up commercial vehicle assembling plants, and some are also getting involved in building of bodies of luxury buses, which will strengthen the local market and reduce their prices.

The demand for luxury buses has been annually increasing at around 20 per cent for the last five years, said the managing director of IFAD Autos.

The price of locally assembled air-conditioned bus would be Tk 56-80 lakh, while the imported one will cost around Tk 1.3 crore, he said.

The price of each of the local non-air-conditioned bus is around Tk 35 lakh, which hovers around Tk 45 lakh for the foreign ones, he said.

The customs duty makes the imported ones costly, he said.

India's Tata, Eicher, Japan's Hino, Volvo of Sweden and Hyundai of South Korea are the other market players in the local commercial vehicles segment.

Iftekhar Ahmed Tipu, chairman of IFAD Autos, was also present.