Maruti Suzuki will be launching a new small car, Cervo, this year. Priced at below Rs. 200,000 (US$ 4,397), the car is targeted at giving competition to Tata's Nano. The company will also be launching a diesel variant of SX4 by middle of this year. The car maker has now given up further development of LPG vehicles and is now concentrating of CNG variants.

The company is also going in for expansion of its production capacity at its plant in Manesar, besides coming up with a research and development centre at Rohtak. It has earmarked Rs. 30 billion for this expansion. The company proposes to add 250,000 units to its capacity at Manesar by adding another production line by 2012.

The R&D centre will be commissioned completely by 2014-15, and will ensure that India becomes the global research hub for Maruti.

Talking to press on 5th March, RC Bhargava, chairman, Maruti Suzuki India, said in keeping with the company's policy, they will be launching one new car each year. Though he refused to give any details about the new car to be launched this year, sources informed TNS that the company was all set to launch Cervo by the end of this year. "The small car market is expanding and we are looking at a bigger chunk of the pie in this segment. The launch of Kizashi, luxury sedan, however, has been put off for the time being," the chairman said.

Bhargava said Maruti was looking at a robust growth of over 22% this year. "We have crossed the production of one million units during this fiscal. We are in the process of increasing the production of Swift and Dzire by almost 70%, so that the backlog and long waiting list for these models can be cleared," he said.

He said this year they had done well in exports and were now looking at developing new markets.