Indian car sales report - November 2014

[WOODSNAKE]

NOVEMBER 2014 CAR SALES

Source : Management Punditz

[sanguine]

We have seen or about to see two turn arounds in our car market, one by Honda and other by Tata Motors. The path taken by the companies are different.

Honda: Tsunami, flood, abnormal price difference between petrol and diesel, these are the three prominent reasons which hit Honda pretty hard in 2011-2012. To recover from the slump, Honda adopted three ponged strategy - India specific diesel engine (1.5 litre), cost cutting, and feature rich cars. With this approach, City reclaimed numero uno status and with help from Amaze and Mobility, Honda is consistently clicking approx 15k sales figures per month. This is their production limit at present.

However, I am little skeptical about the long term effects of this approach. Presently Honda has ceded the 15-30 lakh market. But once upon a time, Honda was a strong player in this segment with Civic, Accord and CRV. As Honda is trying to concentrate only in the sub 15 lakh areas and prioritizing quantity over quality, features over engineering, I won't be surprised if people will gradually club Honda with Hyundai and Suzuki. Despite numerous attempts, both Suzuki and Hyundai are yet to establish themselves as serious players in above 15 lakh segments. Same may happen to Honda too if they continue to neglect this segment.

Tata Motors : After continually losing market share, TML has finally seen some positive growth thanks to new kid Zest. From the initial feedbacks this is well deserved because Tata has learned the lessons in a hard way. Thankfully they're not taking the short-cut to success. They have rightly identified the biggest problem area and trying hard to address them - i. e. QUALITY. Zest is a quality product and can even overshadow something like Amaze. Safari Storme also made a quality jump vis-a-vis last gen Safari. Similarly Bolt is expected to be a good product and will probably eat Brio for breakfast, lunch and dinner. TML still need to get the act together as far as engineering refinement and design goes, but their progress is heart warming so far.

However another Indian company Mahindra is facing turbulent water. They are in similar position where TML was 4-5 years back, resting on the laurel of couple of models without trying to infuse new ideas into portfolio.

[sparkls]

lakh areas and prioritizing quantity over quality, features over engineering, I won't be surprised if people will gradually club Honda with Hyundai and Suzuki.

i am feeling the same.amaze is the prime reason