Friday, June 11, 2010

Mitsubishi puts faith in electric cars


Mitsubishi Motors Corp aims to advertise by the end of 2010 how it affairs to get billions of dollars in adopted shares off its antithesis sheet, and will bare a advance plan for a 56 per cent jump in agent sales at the aforementioned time, says its president, Osamu Masuko.

The advance action would await on two pillars, he said: Mitsubishi's backbone in ecology technology through its electric car business and amplification in arising markets through the "Global Small Car", which is due to go on auction by the end of 2011.

Mitsubishi Motors became the world's aboriginal mass-volume carmaker to activate affairs battery-run electric cars with the egg-shaped i-MiEV, with a sales ambition of 40,000 units by 2012.

Masuko said Mitsubishi Motors planned to beef up its zero-emission line-up, abacus a commercial-use electric microvan in Japan in 2012, followed by a battery-powered adaptation of the All-around Small Car in developed markets by the end of 2012.

A petrol-engine adaptation of the All-around Small Car is due to hit showrooms in 2011, and Masuko said the carmaker will acceptable body the bargain archetypal in Thailand, by amalgam a fresh branch with accommodation of about 200,000 units a year.

Article continues below

He said Mitsubishi Motors additionally basic to body the model, which it wants to amount beneath US$10,930 ($16,291), in China, Brazil or India.

Through such steps, Masuko said, Mitsubishi Motors would ambition all-around sales of 1.5 actor cartage by 2013-14, apery a 56 per cent jump from the year concluded this March.

Mitsubishi Motors has suffered a aciculate accelerate in sales in contempo years and abounding analysts accept alone its banal from their advantage due to the changing affair of added than $4.4 billion of bedevilled adopted shares issued mostly to the Mitsubishi group.

Masuko, who has been tight-lipped about how Mitsubishi Motors would accord with the shares, said converting them to accepted stock, affairs them through a third-party allocation, affairs them back, or a aggregate of these accomplish were the alone options.

"I appetite to be able to allocution about it by the end of the year," said Masuko. He said, however, the all-a-quiver all-around abridgement could get in the way.

"If these altitude continue, it ability be difficult to blanket up a accommodation by year-end," he said.

Converting all the adopted shares to accepted banal would aftereffect in a massive concoction of Mitsubishi Motors shares, abacus added than 3.5 billion shares to the accepted 5.5 billion.

In allotment to adapt for the achievability of absolution at atomic some of the adopted shares, Masuko said he additionally aimed to acquaint the company's roadmap for advance by the end of 2010.

Mitsubishi Motors has been bushing bare branch accommodation through accumulation deals with France's PSA/Peugeot-Citroen. The ally had explored a basic amalgamation but alone those talks in March.

Mitsubishi Motors is endemic 15 per cent by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and 14 per cent by Mitsubishi Corp.