While he has been around for sometime in India, Guillaume Sicard, President, Nissan India Operations has just completed one year at the current position. And he already finds the journey quite fascinating because the market is transforming extremely rapidly.

He recognises that the India ‘is a very demanding market with a very high level expectation'. And he also explains the logic: "When you look at the more mature markets like Europe and Japan, we know what to expect. The median age in those markets is around the 40s - so there is far more stability. But in India, the median age is about 27 and that is why we have such pace."

Sicard finds ‘everything very young here', and it's also about the time international players have been around. "When you look at global OEMs, except for a few of them like GM and Toyota, most of them have come here quite recently - relatively speaking." In fact, even Nissan is just about five years old in India.

"So it's very challenging to work in a young company where you have to develop the mindset and the culture, you have to establish the process and you have to stabilise the organisation. It is all the more challenging because the market itself is quite demanding," he reiterates.

The Chennai manufacturing plant where the Nissan cars are made in India is the number three plant in terms of size in the alliance (Renault-Nissan) and it is also one of the youngest plants.

"We also have a R&D company in Chennai which is also very young but we already have 5,000 people working there. And the sales & marketing side is in fact the youngest because we took over from Hover about one and half years ago. That's where we stand right now.

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