Nirlesh Tomar, a manager at the Hero Honda factory in Gurgaon, north of New Delhi, points to a powder-blue robotic arm as, in a matter of seconds, it welds together two halves of a motorcycle, one of more than 4m that will roll off the company's production lines this year.
So rapacious is demand, he says, that the world's biggest manufacturer of scooters and motorbikes is considering building a fourth plant less than two years after opening a state-of-the-art facility in the pilgrimage city of Haridwar. That factory, which started production just six months before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, might have looked like a mistake. But Mr Tomar says the company has never looked back. Sales leapt by one-quarter last year and are beating expectations this year, too. Nor is heavy demand for motorcycles a sign Indian consumers are trading down from four-wheeled vehicles. Figures out this week show that car sales reached a record high in July, rising 38 per cent from the previous year to 159,000.
India, which should grow at 8.5 per cent or more this year, is not the only Asian economy roaring ahead. As the US frets about the possibility of a double-dip recession and Europeans scour the horizon for signs of the next sovereign debt default, Asia is in confident mood. Having survived the financial crisis, most Asian economies appear to be defying gravity. This year, according to consensus forecasts, economies in the vast region stretching from the Indian subcontinent to Australasia will expand by 8.6 per cent excluding Japan. That would be the fastest pace in 20 years.
