To meet the growing demand from e-commerce companies for last-mile delivery cars, PMI Electro Mobility, a top producer of electric buses in India, is considering releasing a variety of tiny electric commercial vehicles.
The company, which has a joint venture with China’s Beiqi Foton, said there is massive potential to electrify the small and medium commercial vehicle segment given the government’s drive to transition urban delivery fleets to e-mobility.
“We are going to have a range of products in these two segments,” said Manvi Jain, director, PMI Group, adding there is strong demand coming in for small electric trucks also from the FMCG sector.
The company is in the process of setting up a new facility in Chakan, Pune, for manufacturing electric commercial vehicles. PMI Electro, which has a 70:30 joint-venture with Foton India, has earmarked an investment of Rs 250-300 crore to make operational the first phase of the project in the next one year.
The initial investment will be made by the promoters using internal resources. PMI Electro’s facility in Chakan will have initial capacity for manufacturing 2,500 commercial vehicles per annum, which can be increased to 3,600 units per annum with minor fine tuning and without any major capex. Beiqi Foton is a technology partner in the project.
“CESL (Convergence Energy Services Limited) has been aggregating demand to electrify fleets operated by State Transport Undertakings (STUs). There is a lot of work going on to develop a charging network for e-buses. Apart from intra-city usage, there is also a lot of potential to grow in the inter-city segment in the next three years,” Jain said.
In the ongoing financial year, PMI Electro is looking at delivering 1,300 buses to various state governments.
