Maruti Suzuki

Timeline

1. 1970The government issues a letter of intent for a small car and Maruti Motors Limited begins work in a rented garage near Roshanara Bagh in old Delhi, with Sanjay Gandhi as managing director.The plan was for up to 50,000 cars a year
2. 1971Maruti Motors Limited is incorporated in August and Sanjay Gandhi buys 297 acres in Gurgaon at about 12,000 rupees an acre for a factory.The first car was planned at about 8,000 rupees, and the cost estimate later rose to about 16,500 rupees
3. 1972The first prototype is completed, with a chassis built in the workshop and a Triumph motorcycle engine for power.It failed a feasibility test at Ahmednagar in 1973 and was judged unsuitable for road use
4. 1974Maruti is granted an industrial licence for 50,000 cars a year, but only 21 vehicles had been made by 31 March 1976 against a plan of 200 units a day.
5. 1977Indira Gandhi loses the general election and the project loses its political backing, and a court orders the dissolution of Maruti in 1978.
6. 1980Indira Gandhi returns to office and, after Sanjay Gandhi's death in a plane crash, the government takes over the small car programme.
7. 1981The government incorporates Maruti Udyog Limited in February as the vehicle for a national small car programme.Suzuki of Japan was the partner the government went looking for
8. 1982Suzuki and Maruti Udyog sign a licence and joint venture agreement in October, with Suzuki taking a 26 per cent stake and a commitment to raise it to 40 per cent after five years.
9. 1983Production begins in December at Gurugram with the Maruti 800, based on the Suzuki Alto, and the company takes about 120,000 bookings in the first year against a target of 20,000 cars.
10. 1985The Gypsy, a 970 cc four wheel drive off road vehicle, is introduced.
11. 1987The company makes its first export sale, a lot of 500 cars to Hungary.
12. 1989The Maruti 1000 is launched and is described as India's first contemporary sedan.
13. 1992Suzuki raises its stake to 50 per cent and Maruti becomes an equal joint venture with the government of India.
14. 1993The Zen is launched, followed in 1994 by the Esteem sedan and the one millionth vehicle built since production began.The second plant lifted capacity to 200,000 units a year
15. 1998A redesigned Maruti 800 arrives, the first design change since 1986, along with the Zen D diesel and a new Omni.
16. 2000The Alto is launched at the same time as an indefinite strike over wages, incentives and pensions.
17. 2002The government privatises the company and Suzuki becomes the majority owner.
18. 2003Maruti Udyog lists on the BSE and the NSE after a public issue that was oversubscribed tenfold, and the Alto remains the volume car of the range.
19. 2004The Alto overtakes the Maruti 800 as India's best selling car after nearly two decades.
20. 2005The Suzuki Swift is launched and the five millionth car is produced.
21. 2007The government sells its residual stake to Suzuki for 2,360 crore rupees, taking Suzuki's holding to 54.2 per cent, and the company is renamed Maruti Suzuki India Limited.
22. 2012The ten millionth vehicle is sold, and on 18 July violence at the Manesar plant kills the general manager of human resources and injures about 100 managers.
23. 2013Suzuki's stake in the company rises to 56.21 per cent.
24. 2015The fifteen millionth vehicle is produced and the NEXA channel opens for premium cars.
25. 2019The company says it will stop making diesel cars from April 2020, the month Bharat Stage VI emission standards begin, and it cuts about 3,000 contract jobs.
26. 2021Maruti announces a new plant at Kharkhoda in Sonipat district of Haryana on 900 acres with an investment of about 18,000 crore rupees.
27. 2022The foundation stone of the Kharkhoda plant is laid in August, and in September the company holds about 42 per cent of the Indian passenger car market.
28. 2024The sales network stands at 2,987 Arena outlets and 495 NEXA outlets, with 4,964 service touchpoints, in August.
29. 2025The e VITARA, the company's first battery electric car, enters production, and the market capitalisation is reported at about 50 to 55 billion dollars.
30. 2026A facelift of the Baleno with a new engine and Level 2 driver assistance goes on sale in September.

What it does

Maruti Suzuki India Limited builds and sells passenger cars, and it does so at a scale no other company in the country matches. It sells hatchbacks, sedans, sport utility vehicles, multi purpose vehicles and now an electric car, through two retail channels and a service network that reaches small towns where most of the country lives.^[1]

The product line is split between the Arena channel, which carries the volume cars such as the Alto K10, the S-Presso, the Celerio, the WagonR, the Swift, the Dzire, the Brezza and the Ertiga, and the NEXA channel, which sells the Baleno, the Fronx, the Grand Vitara, the XL6, the Jimny, the Invicto and the e VITARA.^[1] In September 2026 Maruti also sells the Victoris through the Arena network, and a refreshed Baleno with a new engine and Level 2 driver assistance arrived in the same month.^[1]

Around the cars sits a services business: Maruti Finance for vehicle loans, Maruti Insurance for cover, Maruti TrueValue for used cars, Maruti Genuine Accessories for parts and accessories, N2N for corporate fleet management and the Maruti Suzuki Driving School for training.^[1] Each of these exists to keep a customer inside the Maruti system from the first enquiry to the resale of the car.

The company is also, in effect, India's largest buyer of auto components, and its localisation programme has been part of the Indian component industry's growth since the 1980s, when the first cars used only about 33 per cent domestic parts and 65 per cent of components were indigenised by 1991.^[1]

History

The Maruti name belongs to two companies. The first was a private venture begun in the early 1970s by Sanjay Gandhi, who had apprenticed with Rolls-Royce in Britain and returned convinced that India could build a cheap car.^[2] The government issued a letter of intent in September 1970, Maruti Motors Limited was incorporated in August 1971, and Sanjay Gandhi took 297 acres in Gurgaon at about 12,000 rupees an acre.^[1] The first prototype ran in 1972 with a Triumph motorcycle engine, and in 1973 the Vehicle Research and Development Establishment rejected it as unfit for the road.^[1] The project limped, produced 21 vehicles by March 1976 against a promise of 200 a day, and was ordered dissolved by a court in 1978 as the political fortunes of the Gandhi family turned.^[1]

The second Maruti is the company that exists today. After Indira Gandhi returned to power in 1980 and Sanjay Gandhi died in a plane crash, the government took over the project and incorporated Maruti Udyog Limited in February 1981.^[1] The state had the licence, the land and the market but not the technology, so it went looking for a partner. Negotiations with Suzuki of Japan began in April 1982 and produced a licence and joint venture agreement in October 1982, with Suzuki taking a modest 26 per cent against the government's preference for 40 per cent, and a promise to raise the stake to 40 per cent after five years.^[1]

Production started in December 1983 with the Maruti 800, a version of the Suzuki Alto, built at Gurugram. The company targeted 20,000 cars in its first year and took about 120,000 bookings instead, which forced a rethink of the production plan and of the mix between the car and the van.^[1] The Gypsy arrived in 1985, the first export order of 500 cars went to Hungary in 1987, and by 1988 the Gurugram plant could build 100,000 cars a year.^[1]

The 1990s brought capacity, models and a change in ownership. The Maruti 1000 sedan arrived in 1989, the Zen in 1993 and the Esteem in 1994, the same year the one millionth vehicle was built and a second plant took capacity to 200,000 units a year.^[1] Suzuki raised its stake to 50 per cent in 1992, making Maruti an equal partnership with the government, and the liberalisation of the Indian economy made the expansion possible after years in which foreign exchange had limited it.^[1]

Maruti Udyog listed on the stock exchanges in 2003 after an issue that was oversubscribed tenfold, and the government's exit was completed in 2007 when it sold its residual stake to Suzuki for 2,360 crore rupees, taking Suzuki to 54.2 per cent and the company's name to Maruti Suzuki India Limited.^[3] The Alto overtook the Maruti 800 as the best selling car in India in 2004, the Swift arrived in 2005, and the ten millionth vehicle was sold in February 2012, followed by the fifteen millionth in May 2015.^[1]

The most recent decade has been about keeping the market lead while the market itself changed shape. Maruti said in April 2019 that it would stop making diesel cars from April 2020 rather than spend on upgrading them to Bharat Stage VI, at a time when diesel accounted for about 23 per cent of its annual sales.^[4] The company then built for scale in the segments where buyers had moved: sport utility vehicles, compressed natural gas and now electric cars.^[1]

Founders and leadership

The company's ownership history is visible in its leadership. R. C. Bhargava, a civil servant who moved into the business, ran the company from 1981 to 1997 and stayed on as chairman, becoming the public face of its positions on safety, policy and diesel fuel.^[1] S. S. L. N. Bhaskarudu followed from 1997 to 1999, Jagdish Khattar from 1999 to 2007, Shinzo Nakanishi from 2007 to 2013, Kenichi Ayukawa from 2013 to 2022 and Hisashi Takeuchi from 2022.^[1]

The managing director's post has itself been part of the joint venture's politics: the original agreement gave both partners the right to nominate a candidate and fixed a five year term for whoever held it.^[1] The arrangement is why the company has been led alternately by Indian executives and by Japanese managers sent from Suzuki.

The founder of the first Maruti remains a contested figure. Sanjay Gandhi's project is usually described as a people's car programme and just as often as a case study in how political access shaped Indian industry in the 1970s, and the two readings sit side by side in the coverage of the company's origins.^[2] What is not in dispute is that the licence, the land at Gurgaon and the idea survived him, and that Suzuki bought into a company the state had already assembled.^[1]

Suzuki Motor Corporation is the controlling shareholder and the source of most of the technology in the range, and its own management in Hamamatsu treats the Indian company as its largest and most important subsidiary by volume.^[1]

The Maruti 800 and the small car market

The Maruti 800 is the reason the company exists in the public imagination. Launched in December 1983 at a price a salaried family could aspire to, it replaced a market of Ambassador and Premier cars that had changed little in twenty years, and it made Maruti the default first car for a generation.^[1] The design was Suzuki's Alto, adapted for India, and the first cars used barely a third of locally made components.^[1]

The 800 stayed the best selling car in the country until 2004, when the Alto took over.^[1] The redesigned 800 of 1998 was the first change to the design since 1986, which says as much about the market's patience as about the company's product cycle.^[1] By the time production of the model ended, the idea it had established, that a small car could be cheap, reliable and widely serviced, was the foundation of the Indian passenger car market.

The small car focus also explains the shape of the business. Maruti builds in volume, sells through franchise outlets in hundreds of cities, and keeps the cost of ownership low through a service network that reaches where its customers live.^[5] That model works best when a large share of buyers are first time buyers, and it is the model the company has defended through every shift in the market.^[6]

Manufacturing plants

Maruti's manufacturing is concentrated in Haryana and Gujarat. The Gurugram facility covers about 300 acres and holds three integrated plants that also build about 240,000 K-Series engines a year, and it makes the Alto 800, the WagonR, the Ertiga, the XL6, the S-Cross, the Vitara Brezza, the Ignis and the Eeco.^[1] The Jimny has also been assembled there since January 2021 for export markets in Africa and the Middle East.^[1]

The Manesar plant was inaugurated in February 2007 on about 600 acres, with capacity raised from 100,000 vehicles a year to 300,000 in October 2008 and then by another 250,000 to 800,000 a year.^[1] Manesar builds the Alto, the Swift, the Ciaz, the Baleno and the Celerio, and the powertrain operations that make diesel engines and transmissions for the range sit in the same complex.^[1]

The Gujarat complex at Hansalpur near Ahmedabad is owned by Suzuki Motor Corporation rather than by Maruti Suzuki, and it supplies vehicles to the Indian company.^[1] The arrangement has been one of the more discussed questions of corporate governance in the company's recent history, because a listed company buying output from a plant owned entirely by its parent raises the question of who captured the return on the investment.^[1]

The next phase is Kharkhoda in Sonipat district, where Haryana handed over 900 acres, the foundation stone was laid in August 2022 and the plan is for one of the largest car plants in the world, with about a million cars a year and four production lines.^[7] Maruti has said it will also spend about 35,000 crore rupees on a second plant next to the Gujarat site with a million car capacity, taking the combined capacity to about 4.35 million units a year when the expansion is complete in 2028 and 2029.^[1]

Sales and service network

The distribution network is the company's most durable advantage. As of August 2024 Maruti had 2,987 Arena sales outlets covering 2,522 cities and 495 NEXA outlets covering 301 cities, along with 4,964 service touchpoints in 2,519 cities, 781 quick response vehicles and 409 mobile workshops.^[1] Most service stations are franchised, with Maruti training the local staff.^[1]

NEXA was launched in 2015 as a separate channel for premium cars and stands for New Exclusive Automotive Experience, selling the Fronx, the Baleno, the Grand Vitara, the XL6, the Ciaz, the Ignis and the Jimny.^[1] The S-Cross was the first car sold through it, and the channel was part of the answer to a market in which buyers were moving up and Maruti's badge was not always the one they wanted on a more expensive car.

The company has repeatedly said it wants a much larger network, and the target of 4,000 outlets was set when the count was around 2,000.^[5] The reach matters for a second reason: a car bought in a small town needs a workshop within reach, and service access is what keeps a first time buyer loyal to the brand for the next purchase.^[6]

Electric vehicles and the change in the lineup

Maruti came late to electric cars, and it says so less often than its rivals do. The plan for a Wagon R based electric car was announced and then cancelled, and the company spent the intervening years arguing that compressed natural gas and hybrid technology were cheaper ways to cut emissions in a market as price sensitive as India's.^[1]

The e VITARA changed that. Unveiled abroad and based on the eVX concept shown in 2023, the electric sport utility vehicle entered production in 2025 and is sold through the NEXA channel alongside the Victoris and the Grand Vitara.^[1] For a company whose identity was built on the cheapest car in the market, a battery electric model is a different kind of product bet, and it arrives while the Baleno facelift of September 2026 and the Brezza carry the volume business.^[1]

The emissions timetable is what forced the change. Bharat Stage VI standards from April 2020 made diesel expensive to keep compliant, the corporate average fuel efficiency norms set a fleet level target, and the company chose to drop diesel entirely rather than pay to upgrade it.^[4] Diesel was about 23 per cent of its sales at the time of the decision.^[4]

Revenue and financials

Maruti Suzuki is a volume business, and its disclosures are best read as a set of physical numbers rather than as a single revenue figure. It ended the 2003 to 2004 financial year with 472,122 vehicles sold, the highest in its history to that point, and it passed its ten millionth Indian sale in February 2012 and its fifteen millionth in May 2015.^[1] It holds about 42 per cent of the Indian passenger car market as of September 2022, having held more than 45 per cent in July 2014.^[1]

The company's market capitalisation was reported at about 50 to 55 billion dollars in 2025, which places it among the most valuable automobile companies in the world and the largest Suzuki subsidiary by production volume and sales.^[1] The shareholder who has gained most from that scale is Suzuki Motor Corporation, whose 56.21 per cent dates from 2013.^[8]

The capital programme is the other half of the financial story. The Kharkhoda plant carries an announced investment of about 18,000 crore rupees and the second Gujarat area plant about 35,000 crore rupees, which together are commitments of a size that only a company with a long run of profitable years can make.^[1] The cost of a shutdown is equally visible in the record: during the Manesar lockout of 2012 the company said it was losing about 75 crore rupees of revenue a day.^[9]

Two regulatory costs sit on top. The Competition Commission of India fined Maruti 200 crore rupees in August 2021 over a discount control policy that restrained dealers from offering customers discounts beyond those the company prescribed.^[10] Separately, Haryana's industrial development corporation demanded 235 crore rupees from the company in 2012 as enhanced compensation to farmers whose land had been acquired for the Manesar expansion, on the strength of a Supreme Court order.^[11]

Shareholding and ownership

Suzuki Motor Corporation holds 56.21 per cent of Maruti Suzuki India, a stake that has grown in steps: 26 per cent at the joint venture in 1982, 50 per cent in 1992, 54.2 per cent in 2002 when Suzuki became the majority owner, and 56.21 per cent by 2013.^[8] The Indian government held the rest until it began selling down, and it exited completely in 2007 when its residual stake went to Suzuki for 2,360 crore rupees.^[3]

The public holds the balance of the equity, and the shares trade on the BSE and the NSE, where the stock is a long standing constituent of the benchmark indices.^[1] The free float makes Maruti one of the most widely held automobile stocks in India, and it also makes the parent's intentions a permanent subject of market attention, because any change in the 56.21 per cent stake would move the index.

The Gujarat arrangement is the governance question that recurs. Because Suzuki Motor Corporation owns the Hansalpur plant outright while Maruti Suzuki sells the cars it makes, minority shareholders have periodically asked what the Indian company gets from the structure and why it does not own the plant itself.^[1] The company's answer has been that the arrangement let it add capacity quickly without carrying the capital cost.

Employees and offices

Maruti's workforce is split between permanent employees and contract labour, and that split is at the centre of its labour history. The company cut about 3,000 contract jobs in 2019 as the market slowed, a reminder of how quickly the non permanent part of the workforce moves with demand.^[12]

The company's registered office is in New Delhi, and its plants sit in Haryana and Gujarat, with the corporate functions spread between Delhi and the Haryana complex.^[1] The headcount at the plants is large even by Indian manufacturing standards, and the sales network adds thousands more people who work for franchise owners rather than for Maruti itself.

Training sits outside the plant as well. The Maruti Suzuki Driving School was set up in Delhi as a corporate social responsibility project and extended to other cities, with classroom sessions and simulators before learners drive on the road, and the company has described road safety as the reason it exists.^[1][13]

Acquisitions and joint ventures

• 1982: a licence and joint venture agreement with Suzuki Motor Corporation, with an initial 26 per cent stake and a commitment to raise it to 40 per cent after five years.^[1]
• 2002: Maruti Finance is launched and the company enters vehicle financing with Citicorp Maruti and Maruti Countrywide, followed by partnerships with ABN Amro, HDFC Bank, ICICI, Kotak Mahindra, Standard Chartered and Sundaram.^[1]
• 2002: two insurance subsidiaries, Maruti Insurance Distributor Services and Maruti Insurance Brokers, are set up with the National Insurance Company, Bajaj Allianz, New India Assurance and Royal Sundaram.^[1]
• 2003: a strategic partnership with the State Bank of India for car finance, under which more than 12,000 vehicles had been sold through the SBI-Maruti arrangement, available in 166 cities.^[1]
• 2006: Suzuki and Maruti set up Maruti Suzuki Automobiles India to build a vehicle plant and an engine plant.^[1]
• 2012: Suzuki Powertrain India Limited is merged into Maruti Suzuki, bringing diesel engine and transmission manufacturing in house.^[1]
• 2022: Suzuki Motor Gujarat, owned wholly by the parent, is the supplier of vehicles built at Hansalpur rather than a subsidiary of the listed company.^[1]

Competition

Maruti competes in the largest segment of the Indian car market, and its main rivals are the other volume makers: Hyundai in hatchbacks and sport utility vehicles, Tata Motors and Mahindra in utility vehicles, Toyota and Kia in the segments above, and Renault and Nissan at the entry level.^[1] The competitive map has shifted under the company: the growth is in sport utility vehicles, where its share has historically been weaker than in small cars.^[1]

The second competitive front is technology. Global NCAP crash tests gave zero stars to several Maruti models built for the Indian market, including the Alto, the Swift, the Celerio and the S-Presso in their tested configurations, while rivals such as Tata and Mahindra used five star results as a marketing claim.^[14] Safety became a purchase argument in a way it had not been for thirty years, and Maruti has had to add equipment and improve body structures to answer it.^[14]

The third front is the distribution of fuel types. Maruti's bet on compressed natural gas and its late entry into electric cars put it at odds with rivals who went electric earlier, and the e VITARA is the company's answer on that ground.^[1]

Industrial relations and the Manesar violence

Maruti has had labour trouble since it began production. The first serious confrontation came in 2000, when employees went on an indefinite strike over wages, incentives and pensions and used a slowdown to press for a revision of incentive linked pay.^[1] The dispute ran through 2001, with the union opposing plans to sell part of the government's stake on the grounds that public ownership protected jobs, and it ended when the government privatised the company in 2002.^[1]

The worst incident came a decade later. On 18 July 2012 workers at the Manesar plant attacked supervisors, set offices on fire and killed Avineesh Dev, the general manager of human resources, and injured about 100 managers, including two Japanese expatriates, according to the company.^[1] The Maruti Suzuki Workers Union said management had ordered hired security guards to attack the workforce, a claim the company and the police denied.^[15]

The dispute behind the violence was about pay, contract work and dignity. The union had demanded a three fold increase in basic salary, a monthly conveyance allowance of 10,000 rupees, a laundry allowance of 3,000 rupees and a house for every worker who wanted one, and its account of the immediate trigger was a supervisor's alleged abuse of a low caste worker.^[1] The company said the unrest began after the union demanded the reinstatement of a worker suspended for allegedly beating a supervisor, and that contract workers earned about 11,500 rupees a month against about 12,500 for a permanent worker at the start.^[1]

Within a week Maruti declared a lockout, saying it could not risk the safety of its employees and that the shutdown was costing about 75 crore rupees a day in lost revenue, and it then said workers would not be paid for the lockout period under Indian labour law.^[9] The plant reopened on 21 August 2012 with 150 vehicles built on the first day, less than ten per cent of capacity, and about 500 workers were dismissed over the violence.^[1]

The legal aftermath ran for years. A total of 148 workers were charged with the murder of Avineesh Dev, charges against 117 were dismissed, and in March 2017 thirty one workers were convicted, of whom thirteen were sentenced to life imprisonment, twelve of them office bearers of the union at the time.^[1] Both sides said they would appeal, and the union has continued to organise for the release of those convicted.^[1] Maruti's response to the episode included a commitment to stop using contract workers, and the company's managing director at the time, Shinzo Nakanishi, said Maruti would stay in Manesar and that Gujarat was expansion rather than an alternative.^[16]

The recovery was faster than the politics. By 2014 the company was reporting a return to normal output and a rebuilt relationship with the workforce, and it continued to invest in Haryana while it built in Gujarat.^[6]

Safety ratings and criticism

Maruti's cars have been criticised for safety performance in a way that no other quality complaint has matched. Several models built for India were crash tested by Global NCAP through the Safer Cars for India campaign from January 2014, and the results were poor: the Alto, the Swift, the Celerio, the S-Presso in its driver airbag configuration and the Eeco were awarded zero stars, while the WagonR and the 2018 Swift with dual front airbags managed two stars out of five.^[1] The Vitara and the Brezza reached four stars and the Ertiga three.^[1]

The company's argument was that it met the standards the government mandated, and its critics replied that the standards covered equipment fitted to the car rather than the strength of the body shell.^[1] In November 2014 the chairman, R. C. Bhargava, said that fitting such features to entry level cars would raise prices and push buyers to two wheelers, which he described as more unsafe, a remark that drew wide criticism.^[1]

In February 2020 Maruti said it would no longer send its cars to Global NCAP for testing, saying it followed the government's own safety standards.^[1] Global NCAP's secretary general said it was disappointing that the manufacturer with the largest share of the Indian market offered such low safety performance for Indian consumers, and pointed out that Mahindra and Tata had both reached five stars.^[14]

A separate criticism is about the treatment of Indian buyers relative to export markets. The company has been accused of building cars for Europe and Africa to a higher specification than the versions sold at home, a charge that recurs whenever a crash test result is published.^[1]

Awards and recognition

• The Brand Trust Report, published by Trust Research Advisory, ranked Maruti Suzuki thirty seventh among India's most trusted brands in 2013 and ninth in 2019.^[1]
• The company received Gold Recognition at the LACP 2020 and 2021 Vision Awards.^[1]
• It was named an Open Innovation Leader and Best Innovative Company of the Year in 2023, and won an award for the best use of artificial intelligence in customer service in the same year.^[1]
• The Maruti Suzuki Driving School programme is cited in the company's own record as its principal road safety contribution, with simulator based training before learners drive on public roads.^[1][13]

Reading the numbers

Four numbers carry most of the information in a Maruti disclosure. The first is market share, which stood at about 42 per cent in September 2022 after exceeding 45 per cent in July 2014.^[1] A company that holds that much of a market is defending rather than gaining, and every new entrant in sport utility vehicles takes a little of it.^[1]

The second is capacity. The existing plants can build about 2,250,000 vehicles a year, and the Kharkhoda and Gujarat expansion plans are designed to take the total to about 4.35 million units when they are complete in 2028 and 2029.^[7] Capacity decisions taken years earlier show up as either market share or as idle factory time.^[1]

The third is the mix of fuel types, because a company that exited diesel in 2020 and has only just begun selling an electric car is exposed to the pace of change in buyer preference.^[4] The fourth is the distribution network, which at 2,987 Arena outlets, 495 NEXA outlets and 4,964 service touchpoints as of August 2024 is the asset that a newer competitor cannot copy quickly.^[1]

Read together, they explain a company whose profits come from volume, whose risk lies in the segments it has not led, and whose most valuable possession is the reach of its dealers.^[6]

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