Renault’s plants in Romania and Morocco are becoming “cost-competitive” in terms of production costs and “Turkey may not be a benchmark in terms of cost anymore,” Carlos Tavares, chief operating officer, said at a news conference in Istanbul, Bloomberg informs, quoted by Mediafax. Renault doesn’t rule out making light commercial vehicles in Turkey, where its joint venture unit Oyak-Renault Otomobil Fabrikalari AS, Turkey’s biggest maker of cars, is producing Fluence and Clio 4 models, he said. The Turkish plant will make a record high of 340,000 cars this year, 20,000 short of its capacity, he said. The French carmaker, whose worldwide deliveries last year fell 6.3 percent to 2.55 million cars and light vehicles, expects the European market to be “slightly better” in the remaining three quarters of this year than the first three months, when European market sales fell 10 percent after a “very poor performance,” Tavares said. Renault was expecting a contraction in Europe of at least 3 percent this year while the worldwide car and light-truck market will expand 3 percent this year, with growth of as much as 11 percent in India. Backed by the revamped Clio subcompact and budget Dacia Logan, the French automaker forecast that its global deliveries will rise this year, it said.
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