India's leading bus manufacturer, Tata Motors, seems set to begin making vehicles in the Ural mountains.
The company, which produces a range of cars, buses and trucks, is looking at the Bashkir trolleybus factory as a possible production facility, Ufa city hall's press service said, adding that Tata officials had toured the factory to gauge its technological capacity.
Tata, which reported $35 billion in consolidated revenue in 2012, has a growing interest in the CIS as a marketplace and already partners with Ukraine's Borispolsky bus factory, RIA Novosti reported, where it rolls out 1,700 buses a year for a variety of buyers, according to its website.
However, in Russia Tata will need to fight to gain a foothold: Billionaire Oleg Deripaska's Basic Element controls about 65 percent of the market.
The factory upon which Tata has set its attention is in Russia's republic of Bashkortostan, to the west of the Ural mountains. In 2010 it produced 119 trolleybuses, 32 percent of total Russian production that year, the news agency reported.
Tata is facing falling sales in India, forcing it to look increasingly abroad to places like China, Russia and South Africa to boost sales, Reuters reported.
Sales of its luxury brands — the company bought Jaguar and Land Rover from Ford Motor Co. in 2008 — have remained buoyant.
