Bangalore, (PTI): Volvo Bus Corporation, the world's second largest maker of large buses and coaches, is looking at leveraging its Indian joint venture VBTL to develop and export components for its global product range.

"The first step is to bring our global products and adapt them to the Indian market and the second would be to localise the component and export these to other global markets," Volvo Bus Corporation (VBC) president and CEO, Hakan Karlsson, told reporters here.

VBTL (Volvo Bus Body Technologies India Pvt. Ltd.,), a joint venture between VBC and Jaico Automobiles, will on Thursday inaugurate its fully operational Rs 80-crore bus body plant at Hosakate here.

To begin with, the company will roll out a new version of Volvo 9400 inter-city buses in the first quarter of 2008 for domestic and export markets.

"With Asia's commercial vehicle market growing at an exponential rate, we see VBTL playing a central role in fueling the company's future growth across the region," Karlsson said.

He said, in the next three years, the company would concentrate on adapting the global products to the Indian market and then gradually, export components from India to markets like South East Asia, Middle East and Africa.

Mainly, the global products would be the chassis part of the bus. As of now, VBC has 10-15 global suppliers in India and the numbers are to be increased.

Karlsson, without giving a timeline, said that the company was open to using India as a product development base, but added that this would depend on how Volvo's India operations shape up in terms of skills and volumes of products sold here.