Buoyed by the faster pace of sales growth in rural India compared to urban centres, the country’s largest carmaker Maruti Suzuki is aiming to expand sales operations to cover the remaining two lakh plus villages as it expects That the growth trend will be driven by factors like rising. Rural income and increasing motorization.
Shashank Srivastava, Senior Executive Director (Marketing and Sales), Maruti Suzuki India said that the company has so far sold cars in about 4.40 lakh villages out of 6.40 lakh villages in the country. Hindu.
Mr. Srivastava said, “For us, rural markets outperformed urban markets last year. Rural markets are now outperforming urban markets, except for a few years when we started monitoring sales separately. “
The company sold 5,47,490 vehicles in the rural market in 2019-20, accounting for 38.5% of the total sales in these markets, which increased to 5,83,300 units (40.9% sales share) and 5,91,800 (43.6%) in 2020-21 Went. % sales share) in 2021-22, when the overall industry was struggling.
“If you take the last three years, urban growth has been negative, otherwise both the markets are growing at a faster pace along with rural growth… and this trend is mainly due to factors like rising rural income, increasing pace of motorisation. Will continue due to… Monsoon has also been good in the last few years,” he said.
He said that as of 2015, the company had covered only about 1.9 lakh villages, and has now worked aggressively towards increasing this number to over 4.40 lakh villages. He said, “This is the true rural story, how motorization is increasing in rural areas….
Shri Srivastava said that the company has the concept of RDSE or Rural Dealer Sales Executive, who is present in the nearby big villages or small towns and given the charge of all the surrounding villages. “We have increased our rural manpower or RDSE from about 11,000 people in 2015-16 to over 17,000 today. Since you may not have outlets in every village, RDSE is a way to increase penetration in rural areas,” he said, adding that the total outlet network in rural areas has also been increased to 1,220 outlets in 2015-2016. Today 1900 outlets.
On buying trends, he said entry level hatchbacks are more popular in rural areas than in urban areas. Such hatchbacks account for 11 per cent of urban sales, while the number in rural areas is 21 per cent.
In 2021-22, the company saw strong demand for models like Alto 800 (92,000 units), Swift (82,000 units), WagonR (77,000 units), DZire (59,000 units) and Eeco (58,000 units) in rural areas.
Mr Srivastava said Maruti Suzuki, which has seen its market share fall from 47.7% to 47.7% in FY12, due to production challenges due to the pandemic, will focus on SUVs as well as hatchbacks, as it aims to target 50 % to go back. Market share in the domestic passenger vehicle market.
“It’s a battle cry… in our organization. We call it creative paranoia… which means you can’t relax.. It doesn’t take much time to change market dynamics, so we’re always looking for efficiency, are on their toes to improve productivity etc,” Shri Srivastava said.
Noting that in the non-SUV segment, the company has a market share of around 67%, he said the lesser number of products in the fast-growing SUV segment has affected its overall market share. “Overall, we have a market share of just 12% in the SUV vertical. This is where we are now trying to increase our presence.”
When asked about the demand for diesel-powered vehicles, Mr. Srivastava said that the share of diesel vehicles, which accounted for about 58% of passenger vehicle sales till about 6-7 years ago, has come down to 18%. , which is currently seen only in demand. The mid-SUV segment due to lack of a good petrol-powered vehicle.