After a successful visit to Lanre Shittu Motors on Monday, kick starting a one week long tour of auto assembly plants in Lagos axis, the Director General of National Automotive Design and Development Council (NADDC), Mr. Joseph Osanipin, has visited other plants.
On Tuesday, the DG and his team including the Director in charge of Policy and Planning, Mr. Sani Musa among others, visited Mikano Motors, Proforce, Simba, Nord and CIG Motors. The next day, he visited Origin Motors, AitoMasters and Jet System.
Repeatedly, the DG reiterated the Council’s commitment to move the Nigeria auto industry from Semi- Knocked Down (SKD) to Completely- Knocked Down (CKD)production capacity as soon as possible.
He said “At NADDC, our ambition is to increase the local components of every vehicle that is coming out from the assembly plants. Basically, our intention is to move from SKD to CKD in the next three to four years”.
He explained that the facilities have enough capacity in terms of installed capacity and level of operation even beyond the perception of the public.
“The essence of this tour is to establish where we are, what is our reality, where are we in moving from SKD to CKD?. And from what we have seen, we have seen what we need to do, those we need to talk to, and the kind of synergy we need to have with other stakeholders to move ahead” he added.
To achieve CKD production capacity in the auto industry, the DG said ” We need to do backward integration and meet the components manufacturers and start bringing them up, because it is a complete ecosystem and no one can do it alone”.
He, however, applauded the readiness of the assembly plants to embrace CNG- production as some of the auto makers were already producing either direct CNG- Powered vehicles or converting to CNG.
In their various responses, the Managing Directors/CEO’s expressed their profound gratitude for the efforts of the NADDC DG in propelling the local automotive industry, adding that with proper regulations and consistent enabling environment, the auto manufacturers could achieve CKD in no distant time.
