Renault India plans to take country roads to drive sales

MUMBAI: The Indian subsidiary of French car maker Renault is planning to target rural markets and have new product interventions to improve its sales in the midst of the ongoing slowdown in the automobile industry to achieve its midterm target of doubling domestic sales volumes.

The company will undertake specific marketing strategies for rural markets and expects to get 50% of its total sales volume from there in the coming years, Venkatram Mamillapalle, managing director for Renault India Operations, told ET. Presently, rural markets contribute only 10% to the company's total sales. Mamillapalle is confident of doubling sales volumes in the domestic market to 200,000 units annually in the next three years.

"A couple of new products which will be coming in the future will take us where we want to go volume wise in the midterm," he said.

The company is targeting sales of up to 20,000 units of its upcoming people mover Triber by the end of 2019, following which it expects average sales of about 7,000 units of the car per month, Mamillapalle said.

The company in an investment mode and will refrain from workforce downsizing despite the sales slowdown, Mamillapalle said. The European car maker will instead leverage the slowdown to re-skill employees, he said.

This is in contrast to its partner company Nissan, which is on a global cost-saving exercise and giving pink slips to over 12,500 employees the world over, including 1,710 in India.

In FY-19, Renault India sold a little less than 80,000 units in the domestic market, a decline of 22% over the preceding year. Its market share contracted 75 basis points to 2.35%. The company had achieved peak annual sales of 135,000 units in FY-17 and sales have been declining since.