Carmakers witness lukewarm sales this festive season

The car makers who generally anticipate a substantial growth in sales during the festive season as compared to the rest of the year are in for a major disappointment. The festival season, which begins with the onset of Navratri till the Diwali, witnesses the peak sales against the entire year sales recording atleast a 15-20% growth. Unfortunately the sales growth subdued to mere 5-10% despite the car makers effort to boost the sales by offering lucrative discounts and schemes.

The market experts also expressed their views that this year has been very unusual recording astonishingly low sales despite a very slow market. The car industry apparently follows a certain pattern, where the car sales see a steep growth in comparison to the rest of the year, however, this year proved to be a deviation. Mr Jnaneswar Sen, Senior Vice-President of Honda Siel cars has blamed the high petrol prices and the increased interest rates on loans for the current slowdown in the car market. Sandeep Singh, the Deputy MD of Toyota Motors had also said that in contrary to the usual footfall of 3-4 times from a normal day, this year the customer quesries were limited to just 2 to 2.5 times more than any other day during the month. Hyundai India reported that the recent launch of the Hyundai Eon small car has attributed to the enquiries of 9000-10000 a day during the entire festive season, which is otherwise quite flat for the rest of its car models.

Arvind Saxena, the Director of Sales and Marketing for Hyundai India had said that it is the Hyundai Eon that has brought the contentment for the company and commented that the positive growth in the near future seems to be unlikely. Still shaken by the recent labour unrest at their plants, speaking on behalf of Maruti India, Shashank Srivastava had informed that the brand image is the only factor working in favour of Maruti Swift despite the sluggish growth in car market and their low availability of models. The overall growth in the car industry has also suffered due to the recurring strikes at the MSI plant resulting in the lower supply of Maruti cars. The Maruti India is the leading car manufacturer in the country producing one of the best-selling cars for the country. P Balendran, Vice President of General Motors in accordance with the Chairman of MSI says that the current demand in the domestic car market lies with the diesel cars and partly for new cars. As opposed to the usual 20-25% growth recorded by the GM during the festival season, this year sales growth was restricted to 5-10%.

However, the sales of Chevrolet Beat, Chevrolet Tavera and Chevrolet Cruze diesel variants have been the source of their happiness with 20% growth in sales. The Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM) had to revise the sales growth forecast for 2011 twice after observing the growth decline by 1.36% from 9,21, 812 units to 9,09,283 units during the first half of the current fiscal 2011-2012, which now stands to be just 2-4%. There are many factors which influenced the SIAM accounting for the recent revision, the continuous labour strike at the MSI plants for one, the others are the obvious factors including the increasing petrol prices and the interest rates on loans. The petrol prices have inched by Rs 10 during the past one year and lending rates have climbed by 3-4%.

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