Apart from this, the company officials said that HM has begun showing slides of the Porter (Calcutta price: Rs 2.07 lakh) at cinema halls in the semi-urban and rural areas. Also a media campaign has been launched in regional publications to gain greater mileage. Though there was no formal national launch of the vehicle, company officials said that the first lot of nine Porters were handed over to dealers on November 30, 1998. Since then, the company claims to have sold 313 vehicles till May 1999. HM had aimed the Porter at the utility and micro commercial vehicle segment.

According to Hindustan Motors' executive vice-president RSanthanam, the company is planning to manufacture around 200 Porters a month. As this is in sharp contrast to the sales performance in the last six months, presumably, HM expects the rural thrust to ensure higher offtake of the vehicle.

The Porters will be sold through the company's new pyramidal marketing and distribution set-up. HM's estimates before the launch of its rural transport vehicle in August last year showed that the company was trailing in the rural utility vehicle market behind players like Mahindra & Mahindra and Tata Sumo, with a market share of around 4.93 per cent. Earlier, Hindustan Motors had only one model in this segment, the Trekker. Company officials claim that the Trekker is the leader in the eastern states of Bihar, Orissa and West Bengal.

The Porter will be sold through HM's greenline network of 100 dealers stationed in semi-urban and rural areas. Initially, the greenline dealer network was to sell the RTVs and Trekkers focussing on 5,000 towns and five lakh villages spanningthe country.

The two other HM dealer networks are the redline and the blueline. There are around 90 blueline dealers selling Ambassadors and Contessas in 500-odd district headquarters, 25 cities and five metros. The redline network has 35 dealers selling the Mitsubishi Lancer, being made in Chennai, in five metros and 25 cities.

The network strategy was designed to efficiently manage the diversified product portfolio and operate a focussed dealer-support network. The CK Birla-led management felt that this unique channel distribution will help the dealers to focus on the products most appropriately. In addition to selling the specific range of models, all the networks will also service specific products and stock spare parts of the entire range of HM models.