Through a joint venture between the Industrial Development and Renovation Organization of Iran (IDRO) and the Belgian company Punch Powertrain, ground was broken for establishing an automatic transmission assembly line in the city of Zanjan.

IDRO and Punch have shares of 20 percent and 80 percent respectively in the joint venture, IDRO News reported. The assembly line is projected to come on stream over the course of 12 months in the Aliabad Industrial Estate of Zanjan.

The factory is planned to manufacture some 160,000 automatic transmission sets per year. In the first stage, the share of domestic production will be 35 percent but it will reach rapidly to 65 percent in the future.

The project has also envisioned that 30 percent of the manufactured products and parts will be exported and a center for research and development as well as applied engineering will be established with the aim of testing kinds of automatic transmission systems on cars and domestically production of 40 percent of parts and shafts of the transmission systems manufactured in the factory.

The chairman of the board of directors of the Industrial Development and Renovation Organization of Iran addressed the groundbreaking ceremony. Referring to the status of the automotive industry in the country and its leading role in the national economy and the outlook for Iranian calendar year 1404 (2025-2026) he said that over the first 10 months of the current Iranian calendar year, starting March 21, 2016, domestic carmakers manufactured as much as the past year’s total production.

Iranian carmakers manufactured 1.05 million vehicles in the first 10 months of the current calendar year and the figure is projected to reach 1.3 million by the end of the year. The industry ministry has envisioned that the annual car output will increase to 1.5 million in the next year.

Elsewhere in his remarks, Mansour Moazzami emphasized that the ministry of industry, mining, and trade has placed the top priority on boosting production and winning customer orientation. He went on to say that quality has been improved compared to the preceding year though it is not satisfactory yet but carmakers are seriously making effort to improve quality as much as possible.

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