Enfield Seeks Kinetic’s Help

Thump producers, Royal Enfield is going through a huge demand of its Classic series of bikes not only in India but in the foreign markets like US and UK as well. But the company has completely failed to cater to the huge demand and as a result the waiting period of Classic 500 Efi and Classic 350 is as high as 6 months or more in major cities of India.

The Chennai based motorcycle manufacturer’s has a capacity to produce 4500 bikes per month but these figures fall short of the current market demand by 2000 units for every month. This comes as a deep point of concern for the company as they lose out a good chunk of customers who do not wait that long. In fact, only real thump lovers who have only one bike in mind wait that long. The actual problem, as RE puts it, is that ‘Classics’ use a better and high quality paint along with a tedious painting process for which the current capacity is not able to meet the huge demand.

However, it’s not that Royal Enfield is sitting quite and watching all this happen in front of their eyes! Company’s authorities are looking out for various help options as and they can come. In the same pursuit, Enfield has reached out to Kinetic Motors for help. Kinetic Motors, which sold its two wheeler business to Mahindras recently, have accepted to help Royal Enfield.

Enfield will use Kinetic’s Ahmednagar plant to set up a paint shop exclusively for its Classic series of bikes which would be used to paint major motorcycle paintable components like rear metal fenders, toolboxes, cover tubes and ornamental covers before they are deployed on to the motorcycles. This could probably be a make shift arrangement from Enfield so as to pacify the current supply crunch. Once the demand is met, Enfield might have fabricated their own paint shop to reduce dependency on others and settle down on a long term solution.