Ending FY19 with double-digit growth will be challenging: Maruti Suzuki Chairman

Recording a double-digit growth by the end of financial year 2019 will be challenging for Maruti Suzuki, said Chairman RC Bhargava, who added that this could be due to the company not coming up with new models this festive season.

“...we have had four years of more than 10 percent growth till last year. That was because of new models, which became blockbusters. We have also found that every year, around the time of the festival season, new models are introduced which lead to this spurt in sales. This year, we have not had any new model launch so that itself has had an impact because the difference between 10 percent growth and 3 percent growth is around 14,000-15,000 vehicles and that amount come from the new sales. The third interesting thing which I found was that in the year before general elections, sales go down. In the year of elections, sales go up. So all these factors have been there other than the usual things but the numbers which I have mentioned to you, these tell a story of how cyclical the sales process is in India," Bhargava told CNBC-TV18.

“There is one other factor which you have to consider for next year and that is the introduction of BS-VI. I am not able to determine what impact BS-VI is going to have on sales next year. Whether customers will come in a rush to buy BS-IV vehicles before BS-VI comes in to avoid the price rise or whether they will wait for BS-VI vehicles to come in because they don’t want to buy BS-IV vehicles. The customer behaviour on this is still not very determined. So this factor of uncertainty will be there. Other than this, I would say, yes next year should be a good year,” he added.

The company on December 5 said it will increase prices of its vehicles across various models from next month to offset the adverse impact of the increase in commodity prices and foreign exchange rates. It, however, did not specify by how much the prices of its vehicles would increase.

Source: CNBC-TV18