Dhaka, Oct. 15 -- It is a piece of welcome news that Fair Group, a local company, is setting up a US$100 million plant in Gazipur's Bangabandhu Hi-Tech Park to assemble vehicles of a globally reputed automobile company. The plant will assemble two popular brands of Hyundai, Creta and Alcazer, for the Bangladesh market. A number of local companies are now involved in automobile assembling, the state-owned Pragati Industries being the oldest one. Pragati has been assembling the highly popular Mitsubishi SUVs. Some other local groups are assembling Malaysian and Chinese cars. Two more companies reportedly are in the process of setting up plants to assemble Japanese Suzuki and Indian Tata cars.

The market for new cars and SUVs has grown from...