Ifad Autos Limited, a local commercial vehicle assembler, has recently installed automated production lines in its plant to scale up output and strengthen quality control further.
The company has been assembling buses, trucks and pick-ups of Ashok Leyland, an Indian commercial vehicle brand, since 2017 - in its factory at Dhamrai, some 42 kilometres from the capital.
The company has also been the sole distributor of Ashok Leyland since 1994.
"With the new automated assembling machines - mostly imported from Germany and USA - the factory can now produce commercial vehicles of improved quality," Ifad Group Chairman Iftekhar Ahmed Tipu told a group of reporters on the factory premises recently.
Apart from this automation, Ifad Autos has also increased local value addition to about 25 per cent by using locally manufactured auto parts.
Referring to a declining trend in demand for commercial vehicles in the country in the last fiscal year due to the pandemic, he said: "We have a capacity to assemble 10,000 units of vehicles per year. But the pandemic forced us to reduce the production to 6,000 units."
However, he noted that the demand for commercial vehicles has been gradually increasing for the last three months with the recovery of the country's economy.
Currently, the factory can assemble about 25 vehicles - both bus and truck - a day.
The size of the annual market of commercial vehicles was 37,000 units in 2018, the highest in recent history. But due to the pandemic, the yearly sale of such vehicles decreased to 18,000 units last year, according to a senior official of the company.
Meanwhile, each share of the IFAD Autos, which was listed on the Dhaka Stock Exchange (DSE) in 2015, closed at Tk 51.90 on November 04. Its shares were traded between Tk 38.50 and Tk 68.40 in the last year.
The company's paid-up capital is Tk 2.52 billion and authorised capital is Tk 3.0 billion, while the total number of securities is 252.95 million, according to the DSE website.
