Sindhu Bhattacharya

New Delhi: New launches continue to drive Motown and despite the all-pervading gloom over rising input costs, car sales don’t appear to have suffered yet.

Most car makers have either raised prices, or are in the process of implementing such increases and sales numbers, for subsequent months may not be so buoyant. But, for now, the party is on. In the first month of the current fiscal, market leader Maruti continued its upward march by registering almost 24% sales growth at 62,336 units as compared to 50,352 units in April 2007.

The launch of Dzire seems to have augured well for Maruti, since sales of the A3 segment (SX4 and Dzire) almost doubled to 4,187 units during the month and accounted for the steepest increase among all segments.

The M800 continued its downward spiral with sales falling by almost 30% to 4,458 units; the combined sales of Alto, WagonR, Zen Estilo and Swift rose 27% to 43,121 units and even the OmniVersa segment registered robust 26% growth at 7,705 units. Exports also kept up the growth momentum, rising by over 64% to close the month at 2,797 units.

Similar to the Dzire push, Hyundai Motor India was largely insulated from rate vagaries by the success of ‘i10’. The Korean major recorded almost 50% growth in overall sales to close the month at 40,001 units as compared to 27,069 units in April 2007 and attributed this robust growth to the ‘i10’.

“We feel that the Budget has been a contributory factor in the robust sales growth. The i10 too has done exceedingly well. With domestic sales alone accounting for over 50,000 units in six months, which is the fastest ever for any model,” said senior VP marketing and sales Arvind Saxena.

Together with the Santro, Hyundai sold 17,334 units in the A1 segment last month. General Motors India logged 24% growth at 5,563 units against 4,474 units last fiscal. Of this, the company sold 1963 units of Spark, 1863 of Tavera, 1055 of Aveo, 393 of Optra and 289 of Captiva. Czech major Skoda reported 81% growth at 1814 units against 1,000 units.

Source : DNA