Wednesday, April 12, 2017
By Kamal Swami
BS-III Vehicles Worth Rs.5,633 Crore Stuck in the Yards of Auto Makers
Despite of heavy discounts offered by all auto makers throughout the country for liquidating the BS-III vehicles according to the orders of Supreme Court by March 31, 2017, automakers still have about 140,000 BS-III vehicles costing Rs. 5,633 crore parked at their yards. As reported earlier Supreme Court had ordered the automakers across the country to stop the sale and registration of BS-III Vehicles within the country with effect from April 1, 2017.
According to industry reports renowned auto makers Tata Motors, Ashok Leyland, Mahindra & Mahindra, Volvo-Eicher, Hero MotoCorp, TVS Motor Co and Honda Motorcycle & Scooter India have 78,638 units of the vehicles manufactured by them stored with their dealers. The loss to the auto makers is stagnated only to the sales of these unsold vehicles, but as an impact of this BS-III vehicles' order by the Supreme Court they also suffered the loss of about Rs. 1,200 crore due to huge discount varying from 10% to 15% for rolling out the existing stock of those vehicles.
Commenting on the prevailing situation, Mr. Vishnu Mathur, Director General, Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers said, the best way to get rid of this problem is to export these vehicles in the markets where the sale of these vehicles still continues. Moving ahead Mr. Mathur said, that upgrading the vehicles in accordance to BS-IV norms will be quite expensive for auto makers. According to data of non-commissioned BS-III vehicles revealed by SIAM automakers had around 824,000 vehicles stored in their stores. This include 671,000 two-wheelers, 96,700 commercial vehicles, 40,048 three-wheelers and 16,198 passenger vehicles. The total cost of this whole inventory was assumed to cost up-to Rs. 20,000 crore.
It is also reported from the authentic sources that some of the two wheeler manufacturers are planning to export the stock of BS-III vehicles to the neighboring markets, while some are planning to dismantle the remaining vehicles by using the useable parts and scrapping the remaining parts.
