Motown Ends FY19 With A Smile

It has been an eventful year for the auto sector owing to various factors like poor festive sales, high insurance cost, liquidity crunch and increased fuel prices.

- Ritwik Sinha

Car sales during 2018-19 never experienced a smooth ride, plagued by huge inventory backlog at the dealerships. It was quite an uphill task to end the year on a high. However, the final sales graph made most producers happy.

The country’s largest passenger car manufacturer, Maruti Suzuki India (MSI) sold 158,076 units in March 2019. This includes 147,613 units in the domestic market and 10,463 units in exports. With this, the company ended 2018-19 with its highest ever total sales of 1,862,449 units a growth of 4.7 percent. This comprised highest ever domestic sales of 1,753,700 units. The export sales were 108,749 units.

Maruti’s mini and compact segment, which comprises of Alto, WagonR, Ignis, Celerio, Swift, Baleno and Dzire, saw a drop in sales in March 2019, as well in the entire fiscal. Compact and mini car sales stood at 99,358 units, down 6.6 percent as against 106,396 units in the year-ago month. Sales during 2018-19 stood at 1,240,854 units, down 5.5 percent, against 1,175,658 units in the previous fiscal.

MSI’s total passenger car segment, which includes the mini, compact and mid-size (Ciaz) segment saw a decline of 6.9 percent in March 2019 at 103,030 units as against 110,717 units. However, during FY19 total sales of passenger cars rose 4.2 percent at 1,287,023 units, against 1,234,571 units.

In the utility vehicle segment, the leading car maker saw rise in sales during March 2019 and FY19. Sales rose by 12.3 percent in March 2019 and 4.1 percent in FY19.

Further, vans like Eco and Omni also saw sales moving north by 201.1 percent in March 2019 and 15.1 percent in FY19. However, the highest growth was seen in the light commercial vehicles (LCV) at 82.9 percent in March 2019 and whopping 138 percent during FY19.