Bajaj is harvesting on their present share of good fortune. Talks had been doing the rounds for a Bajaj and KTM tie up and it has finally materialized. KTM manufacturers will sell their bikes in India after collaborating with Bajaj automakers. Though the brand name embellishing on the bikes will be that of the KTM itself, the partnership is going to churn quite a lot of revenue for Bajaj. Bajaj will hold a massive 40 percent of the shares in this tie up. Bajaj is supplying the partnership with marketing strategies and their Pro biking showrooms, while KTM supplies the technology. The first of its kind, Duke 200 have already been launched in India early this year. KTM manufacturers are planning on bringing in three more bikes to the country in the next three years expanding into a thriving sports bike market.
But that is just one half of Bajaj’s present success story. The other half is due to not necessarily luck, but its own genius. Bajaj is not only investing in the partnership with KTM, but also extracting every ounce from it. The bike makers are modeling their own home grown products based on the KTM bike designs and technology.
Bajaj Managing director, Rajiv Bajaj, made another big announcement following up on the unveiling of the 2012 Bajaj Pulsar 200NS in Mumbai. He in his statement hinted at the introduction of the Bajaj Pulsar 350 in the early months of 2013. This model will be in a way aping the engineering of the KTM Duke 200. In a recent interview with one of KTM’s spokesperson, it was accidentally revealed that the global biking giants are planning on producing a 350cc variant of the Duke model in India. So it seems an Indian version of the 350cc Duke is a clinical step in harnessing foreign technology on Indian bikes.
Bajaj Pulsar 350 will be priced a few notches below that of the KTM version of the same and as you can expect, it will also fair a few levels below its Duke counterpart in terms of performance and functioning. But given the market for affordable sports bikes in India, this seems to be a smart investment by Bajaj corporations.
The Bajaj Pulsar 350 will be engineered with the same tri spark technology used in the latest Pulsar 200 NS model. This allows for an optimum ignition under all conditions. It is the first bike globally to induct in it such a technology in a single cylinder engine. It has equipped its engine with liquid cooling through four valves. Some bottom end technologies from the Duke 200 manifest itself in the Bajaj 200 NS. This is also going to be the likely characteristic for that of the later, the Indian cousin of the Duke, the Bajaj Pulsar 350. The buzz is already on, given the fact that not only is it going to house in itself foreign technology and engineering but more importantly come at prices adhering to an average sports bike enthusiast.
