India’s largest automobile manufacturer Maruti Suzuki has announced that it will increase the price of its vehicles in January 2021. This, the company said is because over the past year, the cost of the company’s vehicles has been impacted adversely due to increase in various input costs. “Hence, it has become imperative for the company to pass on some impact of the above additional cost to customers through a price increase in January 2021,” the company said in a statement.
The price increase shall vary across different models, the statement added.
Speaking to TNM earlier, the executive director, Marketing and Sales at Maruti Suzuki India, Shashank Srivastava said that despite a good festive season, the uncertainty still remains in the automobile market beyond December.
Maruti Suzuki India reported a 1.7% year-on-year rise in total sales for the month of November 2020. Maruti Suzuki’s passenger car segment sales declined 2.4% to 135,775 units from 139,133 units year-on-year in the same month.
However, Maruti Suzuki had said that it clocked the highest ever wholesale sales in October, with a market share of 51.1% in the domestic automobile sector.
Shashank had said that the Dussehra period in October 2020 was good with Maruti Suzuki selling 166,825 passenger vehicles and light commercial vehicles combined domestically during this month. While asserting that the momentum was there, he said the uncertainty lies in the fact that it is not clear how much of the sales happened due to pent-up demand.
The company has also witnessed an interesting shift towards hatchback vehicles from sedans in the past few months. This is attributed to consumers now looking for functionality and spending judiciously.
When asked to give a timeline as to when the auto industry is actually expected to be back in a position where demand is reviving, Shashank told TNM at the time, “We don't know when it will come back. But certainly, we will have a better picture once COVID-19 pandemic gets behind us. Post that, we will focus purely on economic factors, which are slightly easier to project.”
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