Friday, February 01, 2013
By Manoj Kumawat
Maruti car sales down 1 percent, Swift Dzire sales climb by 97 percent
January is over and the Indian car market is still reeling. The largest car maker has posted a net loss of over 1.06 percent in its sales in January after posting meager 3.2 percent growth in December last year. This infers that the market conditions are grim and it will take another 2-3 months for it to recover. There are high hopes that it will improve fast now as RBI has cut the cash reserve ratio (CRR) enabling the banks to lower their lending rates. This is a positive signal and it will help car buyers get car loans at lower rates than before. Some banks have declared lowering of lending rates while some are about to follow suit.
But Maruti’s monthly car sales result has shown that still the Indian car market is in a bad shape and it will take sometime to recover. Though the impact of the RBI move will be small but it could improve the overall sentiment and markets are sentiment driven. In January, Maruti sold as high as 1.14 lakh cars (1, 14,205 units exactly) which is over 1228 units less than what it sold in the same month last year. Though domestic sales have improved, exports have come down by over 22.29 percent.
Interestingly, despite the volume sales of Maruti Alto 800, the mini segment car sales slid by over 10 percent. The compact car segment which is spearheaded by Maruti Swift also saw a decline by around 7 percent. Meanwhile, Maruti Swift Dzire sales have increased by over 97 percent. Maruti SX4 has yet again disappointed the car maker as its sales went down by 48 percent while the worst sufferer was Maruti Kizashi that could not post even a single unit on the sales chart. The utility car segment saw an increase of over 26 percent with Maruti Ertiga getting some inspiring numbers.
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