Chevrolet targets mining industry with Colorado

By Er Audy Zandri

PT General Motors Indonesia through its brand Chevrolet has on Monday introduced the All New Colorado, a three variant mini truck powered by 2.5L, DOHC, 16 valve Duramax diesel-engine segmented to the mining industry.

"This is our first mini truck product for the Indonesian market," said GM Southeast Asia President Martin Apfel.

A source in the company told Petromindo.com that GM is confident enough to set a high sales target for the products.

"We are targeting to sell more or less 10,000 units of cars this year, since we managed to sell about 5,000 cars in 2011. We have five new products to introduce in 2012, three of them being the All New Colorado. If 5,000 units are the target for the already introduced products, you can guess the sales target for this product," said the source, adding that 90 percent of the sales target for Colorado is fleet users.

Another source told Petromindo that GM, although known to introduce trucks in the US market back in the old days, only managed to come up with a new mini-truck to the rest of the world this year due to a specific reason.

"The truth is, we just terminated our cooperation contract with Isuzu last year, which had prevented us from introducing trucks, one of Isuzu's main product line up," he said.

Now that the contract is terminated, GM aims at introducing the All New Colorado in 54 countries, Indonesia being the second after Thailand, where the specific vehicle type is manufactured.

GM spent 5 years and US$2 billion worth of investment to develop the vehicle, which was designed and tested in Brazil.

The cars are priced from Rp265 million OTR.

Through a total of 34 dealers, 4 of them located in Kalimantan and 7 of them in Sumatra, Chevrolet All New Colorado aims at catering the mining and agriculture industry through various programs, including a week's car maintenance training program for company's car engineers and visiting car engineers.

GM also expects to open another dealer in Kalimantan this year, claiming East Kalimantan as its strongest market.

In a market dominated by the likes of Ford and Mitsubishi, sales for double-cabin mini trucks in Indonesia managed to climb up 19 percent to approximately 17,815 units in 2011, or accounted for about 2 percent of the total car sales in Indonesia.

"The market has a lot of potential to grow and we're ready to take part," said GM Indonesia President Director Marcos Purty.

Editing by David Mustakim