Maruti Suzuki sells nearly 2 lakh cars this festive season

It has been a bumper ride for Maruti Suzuki, India's largest passenger carmaker, as it sold 1.92 lakh cars during the festive season.

The festive season — from Navratri on September 26 to the end of Diwali festivities on October 26 — recorded an estimated 4,00,000 units sold for the auto industry as a whole, said Shashank Srivastava, senior executive officer at Maruti Suzuki. Of these, Maruti Suzuki sold 1.92 lakh cars. "Last year the deliveries for Maruti were about 1.37 lakh, so that is a more-than 40 percent growth,” he told CNBC-TV18.

The top selling vehicles during this period were WagonR, Baleno, Swift and Brezza.

Meanwhile, the top-selling vehicle for September was Alto with 25,000 units. "The second was WagonR with 20,000 cars, third was Baleno which was sold under 20,000 and the Brezza with about 15,000 units," he said.

Srivastava said that the entry segment has seen sales drop over the last two years. “The entry-level segment as a percentage of the overall sales in the industry has come down. In fact that has been the trend for the last couple of years. However, if you look at the absolute volumes, it is still quite large — still around 36 percent of the overall industry," he said, adding that the industry is expected to touch around 3.8 million sales this year, of which 35 percent would be small cars.

Regarding Maruti Suzuki, Srivastava said that the company has a very large market share, in excess of 70 percent, in the entry segment. "So in terms of overall absolute volumes, it is still an extremely large segment for us," he said.

Srivastava the automaker has a fairly healthy pipeline of bookings. "Maruti Suzuki has a 4,40,000-strong order book," he said.

Srivastava said that pending bookings have built up due to production constraints. "Once we are able to produce more, pending bookings will ease out," he added.

He said the tailwinds in the past came about on account of the semiconductor shortage, which he said has eased in recent months. “The semiconductor situation has gotten better over the last few months. However we are not able to give any clear date on when it will become normal because the visibility of the semiconductor component availability is not there for the long term," he said.

Srivastava said that it is important to watch out for macroeconomic factors, including the impact of GDP growth, on auto sales. He believes retail finance rates may see a spike on account of escalating repo rates.