“Auto sector foresees a promising future and to be the biggest contributor to the Government’s macroeconomic goals, provided, a predictable and long term auto policy is in place,” said Chief Executive IMC Ali Asghar Jamali.

“Being the largest manufacturing industry, the whole auto sector plunged into a deep crisis during the nationwide lockdown by dint of COVID-19,” he pointed out.

He added that all auto manufacturers incurred huge losses and there was a month (April) when not a single vehicle was produced by all three OEMs.

“However, not a single employee was laid off and we even provided interest free loans to our vendors to be committed to our core value of promoting the local engineering base in Pakistan,” he added.

He added that the momentum started picking up since July and due to overwhelming demand, the company went for double-shift production, which will help meet demand and reduce delivery lead time. IMC has been striving to meet the expectations of its customers and one of them is the offering earliest delivery to them. We are happy that double-shift production will fulfill our commitment to them.

It is to be noted that Toyota’s production was well in pace at the start of this calendar year as total production was over 4,000 units in the month of January with a Month on Month increase of around 90%. However, owing to the Government directed lockdown on account of the COVID-19, production came to a virtual halt until May-19 when the lockdown eased and ramp up began. Things got far better in September with the production of over 4,300 units.

He added that despite such a crisis the company did not compromise on its quality production and its commitment to enhance the engineering base of Pakistan.

“The company contributes 1 percent to the national exchequer through trading parts (by procuring local parts worth over Rs. 200 million every working day) while it employs around 3,000people to cater to second highest market share by dint of 75,000 units of annual production capacity,” said Jamali.

“And this all is being done in spite of various challenges to the industry including Rupee devaluation, imposition of Federal Excise Duty, and Additional Custom Duty,” said Jamali.

He said their request to the Government is to support the biggest manufacturing sector of Pakistan which employs 3 million direct and indirect labour and promote ‘Make in Pakistan’ policy by encouraging industrialization.