Tuesday, May 1, 2012

What The Future Holds For Renault

By Andrew R. Ford


Renault selected Tavares Carlos as Operational Director, and the new plans of the business for the next years were announced with this occasion. Renault is assertively looking to enjoy a strong brand identity in Europe and America and be competitive in the SUV niche in China.

Renault is also aggressively incorporating eco-friendly technology to their plants, like solar panels attached to the roofs at their French factories. This challenge has become one of the largest in the auto industry: more than 450 000 square meters will be covered, having a capacity of 60 MW (the equivalent of a medium consumption of a city with 20 000 inhabitants).

The job will get started in June and is expected to be completed in February of next year. This way, the firm would like to reduce the effects of the pollution on the environment. A comparable project was launched by Seat that already has a roof of this kind on the Spanish factories.

Renault is also going to fix their image pertaining to industrial espionage. Renault really should become an attractive mark, and they have to sell many expensive cars, and to improve its brand in front of the clients, where Nissan already works well. The espionage scandal has generated some deterioration of their image but it is only part of their challenges. The top people of Renault also considers their present car designs are a bit out of step with todays consumers and they need to improve on it.

Radical changes began to occur at the company when Renault hired Laurens van den Acker as chief designer. The Clio is anticipated to be the first vehicle under Renaults new vision with a redesigned body and engine as well as state of the art electronics.

Additionally, Renault sold 150 000 vehicles of medium and superior class in 2005 and the sales from this past year scarcely got over 100 000. The new line of Renault cars are not expected to hit the market until the 2014-15 season, they must do their best to exploit those cars that sell well in their current line. The press in France feel that Renault must make an effort to even out the large divide between their partner, Nissan in the amount of cars sold as Nissan has sold over four million cars while Renault has sold 2.6 million cars.

An additional issue that Renault has is the lack of presence in China but are trying to fix that between 2013 and 2016. In addition, they do not have any presence in the United States since they departed decades ago. There are no clear plans concerning the American markets but Renault will try to consolidate its position in Russia and Brazil. As for the Indian market, they have been struggling to some degree but continue to produce new cars that will appeal to Indian consumers.

Ultimately, as Renault looks to grow sales by 400,000 units, they are going to need to continue improving and innovating their current line of cars.

Share this article to your friends or go ahead and click here for everything automotive.




About the Author:



0 comments:

Post a Comment