Ashok Leyland plans to hike prices by 1-2% soon

Ashok Leyland's concerns over falling commercial vehical sales rose for June as numbers declined 4.63% to 8,009 units on a year-on-year basis. Talking about the issue, its managing director Vinod Dasarisaid said that rise in retail interest rates have affected the demand of heavy vehicles "And, the company is, therefore, planning to hike rates by 1-2% very soon." 

"However, July sales numbers are likley to be better as compared to this month's (numbers)," he told CNBC-TV18, adding that the Hinduja Group company plans to sell 1.07 lakh units by FY-12 wherein domestic sales would stand at 95,000 units.
"The company is in process of launching commercial vehicles in new export markets as nourishing margins in our inflation-ridden landscape is getting difficult," he further said. Nonetheless, Dasari is optimistic about maintaining its FY12 margin guidance of 10-11% on expectations of increase in market share. Below is the verbatim transcript of his interview with Udayan Mukherjee and Mitali Mukherjee. Also watch the accompanying video. Q: There was a pretty dramatic turnaround in your month-on-month numbers. Could you just explain where that big jump came in from in terms of sales?
A: It was partly because sectors like cement are seeing a turnaround. But largely it was due to the fact that our April and May sales were below what we had targeted. This is the reason June looks better but we expect July should be better than what we did in June. Q: There has been some lumpiness in your monthly volume numbers, which is making it little difficult for analyst and investors to predict what will happen by the end of the year - do you think you will still manage to sell 1,07,000 units by the end of the year?
A: That is still our plan, and hopefully the market will hold up. We are estimating that the market will grow somewhere around 8-10%. A lot of it depends on how the economy will do and monsoons. If the market does hold up and some of the key sectors that we are leaders for example cement and infrastructure or parcel carrier do well then we will be able to achieve our numbers. Q: You have been losing market share because of your problems in Southern India, do you think you can arrest that decline because market share is difficult to get back once you lose it?
A: We did go as low as 17% market share back in Q3 of last year and we came back to about 26-27% in Q4. It is a fluctuating market, it