LAHORE: Hyundai-Nishat Motor Company on Wednesday started commercial production of light trucks at its assembly plant in Faisalabad.

This news comes at a time when automobile sales in the country are rapidly plummeting amid stabilisation policies being pursued by the government under the $6 billion International Monetary Fund programme.

The company, which plans to launch three locally assembled Hyundai passenger cars -- each every six months from June, expects to run one shift over the next few months in view of the depressed domestic auto sales, rolling out only 20-25 units of its light trucks a day.

“The capacity utilisation depends on demand which has already hit the bottom,” a senior company executive told Dawn on Wednesday, saying the firm could assemble up to 50 units a day in two-shift production operations.

“If the demand goes up, we will increase our production and launch the second shift as well. Until then we plan to run one shift only.”

According to the latest published data from the Pakistan Automotive Manufacturers Association (Pama), the car sales declined by 43.2 per cent to 59,097 units in the first half of 2019, from 104,038 units from same period last year.

Nishat Group has partnered with Millat Tractors and Soljitz Corporation of Japan to invest Rs19 billion to assemble Korean cars and light trucks at its manufacturing facility spread over 67 acres.

Published in Dawn, January 16th, 2020