Festive goes by for car makers

The car makers had hinged a lot of hope on the gone-by festive season sparking off demand. But looks like people have either decided to wait or have postponed their buy. With petrol prices coming down, one would have expected demand to pick up but that apparently has not happened.

Maruti and Hyundai showed a marginal rise in sales during October but others like M&M, Toyota Kirloskar and Ford, all showed a decline. Honda, surprisingly did very well with a 19% (YoY) rise in sales for October. Tata Motors showed a 17% drop while Ford’s sale dropped 27% and Nissan had a 16% fall too.

And keeping up with the trend of the past few months, two-wheelers actually did well. TVS showed a 18% jump in Oct sales and Royal Enfield showed a whopping 47% rise. So what does this mean? People now prefer to buy two-wheelers more for easy travel or are they waiting for interest rates to come down for buying cars? A talk with a few dealers in Mumbai shows a different picture – they say that demand is tremendous, there are much more walk-in customers than before but the moment they hear that delivery of the car could take anywhere between 2-6 months, they walk away, maybe buying a two-wheeler instead, which is available off the counter. Whatever be the reason, if fuel prices keep on dropping, there is no doubt that in the coming months we could see an uptick in demand. Now that will be true festive time for car makers.