The Big Picture – In India, festive season has always acted as a catalyst for the automobile industry’s performance. The same is evident in current month’s figures which are showing 7.8% rise. This is just an indicator of how the market will behave when India’s biggest festival, Diwali will come next month. Every company which has best cars in its segment has seen the skyward trend in sale and those which don’t have the best ones have suffered. Maruti Suzuki geared up once again for maximum performance and thus showed consecutive growth in sales after the resolution of Manesar issue. Maruti Suzuki sold 96,002 cars to take the number one position followed by Hyundai, which recorded an impressive growth by selling 35,778 cars. Mahindra and Mahindra secured third position with a very good margin over Tata Motors which stands at number four. Honda seems to have struck the cords perfectly by adding sort of ‘essential’ variants to its lineup. Overall performance of the market can be depicted in one sentence as ‘Survival (read growth) of the Fittest’.
Top 20 – There was a time when Alto lost its number one position to its sister Swift. But the launch of the new Alto800 pumped the fuel into the sales graph once again and hence it secured that position with great lead. In very short span, second position is reclaimed by Swift as 15,433 units of it were sold in October. Maruti Suzuki’s Dzire stood at number 3 and WagonR at number 4. Next shocking thing to note is that Nano is nowhere in the table which leaves only Indica and Indigo range from Tata Motors in Top-20 chart. Duster is continuing its forward march as it now climbed up 5 places and is at number 15. In this month, the Top-20 table is completely shuffled from top to bottom.
Company Wise Break Up – By the end of October, Maruti Suzuki reached the full capacity at Manesar and hence sales numbers of Swift sisters were soaring high. Also, new Alto800 is also showing its effect as its sales figure crossed 25,000 mark after a long time. This in turn gave Maruti a boost of 8% in sales volumes over the last month. Only four cars namely Alto, Swift, Dzire and WagonR accounted for 70,030 cars out of a total of 96,002 Maruti Suzukis sold in October. Indeed it’s a moment of joy at MSIL camp as all of its bread butter offerings are doing well. Now it’s time to revive cars like A-star, SX4, Estilo which are lagging far behind. For Hyundai, it looks like victory on all fronts as every model except Elantra has shown strong growth. This might be a result of extra dispatches done in advance to cope up with festive demands. The effect of Alto800 is not felt by Eon as of now. Hyundai finished this month with a rise of 17% in sales.
The war for number three position is going on since past few months between Mahindras and Tata Motors. Till now, nobody took considerable lead over the other during this war. But this month Mahindras managed to leap forward by a healthy margin over the Tatas. For Mahindra, Bolero performed outstandingly as it recorded sale of 11,071 units. Quanto also has shown strong growth by selling 2494 units. Overall, Mahindra secured third place with 16% rise in sales. Tata motors is struggling hard with their existing product portfolio to lure the customers. Almost all Tata products were performing just at average levels. Nano once again recorded a steep fall in sales. Tata Motors managed to sell 4,004 Nanos during the last month. Overall, Tata Motors’ sales plunged down by 2.46% and hence they stood at number four position.
Honda Cars India has been observed working strongly to address its issue of falling sales. The City CNG and Brio AT pumped up the volumes very strongly and hence Honda recorded sales of 8,085 units with a growth of 46%. For the company having only petrol models in portfolio, these figures are quite impressive. Toyota India is able to just keep up the momentum as it showed mere 1.37 % rise in sales.
The month of October does not seem to be going well for American duo. Both GM and Ford recorded a decline in sales. But this picture is likely to change drastically as both of them have added new offerings in their portfolio. Sail U-VA and New Spark from GM and New Figo from Ford are likely to carry the major responsibility of driving sales up of their respective companies.
The value addition done by Volkswagen to Polo and Vento is working out quite well for them. The sales graph of both cars is rising steadily, which is quite essential for Volkswagen to keep hold in the market. On the contrary, Skoda failed to address their concerns once again as they recorded fall in sales.
The two perfectly contrasting pictures can be seen in the following two tables of sales figures of Renault and Nissan. When Renault Duster, Scala and Koleos gave the best performance of 2012, Nissan’s Sunny and X-trail gave the worst performance. Hence, it costed Nissan a whopping 48% drop in sales. At the same time, Renault gained 22% sales volume. Since the launch of Duster, Renault’s sales graph has never touched the red color.
Personally speaking, the figures in the bottom two tables has never been exciting since a long time now, because the change in sales by 100 or 200 numbers for these companies makes performance figures go haywire. For Fiat, absolute editions of Linea and Punto didn’t work. Linea’s sales are now below 50 mark, a new low record for a very potent car.
Category Wise Break Up
Gainers Vs Losers
Podium Finishers
Things To Look Out For
- November is a month of biggest festival of India i.e. Diwali and hence happiest month for automobile manufacturers.
- Many companies are ready with facelifts and limited editions.
- Performance of some important launches: Alto800, Sail U-Va, Safari Storme, Figo.
- Can November month’s sales bring back the joy in the industry?