Wallenius Wilhelmsen Logistics (India) has been awarded a contract to provide yard management services and domestic distribution of Nissan vehicles to dealers in India.
It is the first such contract the company has secured in the country and now means the India division will provide a full range of factory-to-dealer services when Nissan begins full production at its joint venture plant with Renault at Chennai from May next year. Trial production of the new global compact model will begin next month but when full production begins, annual capacity is set at 200,000 vehicles.
“We are not in a position to disclose the final name of the car or details related to product specifications and pricing, which will be announced some time in the future," Nissan Motor India managing director and chief executive Kiminobu Tokuyama said in a statement.
Renault froze its investment in the plant earlier this year. Nissan has continued to move ahead, although at half the original capacity planned.
WWL will work closely with existing local trucking and logistics companies to develop a distribution network and has no plans to invest in trucks of its own. It has not announced any plans for rail-based distribution.
“We are currently in the process of evaluating a number of pan-India transport vendors based on Nissan and WWL quality standards,” Sandeep Chawla, head of inland and terminal services India at WWL, told Automotive Logistics. “We have so far evaluated the top 20 transport vendors and will make a decision on the suppliers network by year end.”
In terms of yard management, WWL India will provide labelling and scanning of vehicles, movement to storage yards from the end of assembly and on to the shipping areas for domestic distribution, as well as added export activity. A percentage of vehicles will bypass storage and will move directly from end of assembly line to the shipping area said the company.
WWL’s India division was established at the beginning of 2009.
