Maruti Suzuki eyes another strong year after record sales in FY 2015

NEW DELHI: Buoyed by highest ever sales in a fiscal, country's largest car maker Maruti Suzuki India (MSI) is confident of tightening its grip on the automobile market with continued focus on sales and service network expansion and new product introductions.

The company had posted total sales of 12,92,415 units in 2014-15, its highest annual sales beating previous best in 2010-11 when it had sold 12,71,005 units.

Its domestic sales of 11,70,702 units in 2014-15 was also its highest ever, better than its previous best of 11,32,700 units sold in 2010-11.

"Last fiscal was definitely a challenging one. When the overall industry grew by about 4 per cent we grew 11 per cent. We were able to do this as we had focused on key areas of sales and service network expansion besides new products," MSI Executive Director, Marketing & Sales, RS Kalsi told PTI.

Expressing confidence of doing better than industry growth in the current fiscal, he said the company would continue with activities to get closer to consumers.

The expectation in the auto industry is that in 2015-16, car sales could grow around 6-8 per cent, although industry body SIAM hasn't officially given any forecast.

"In the beginning of last fiscal we had set out to increase our presence in rural markets while deepening penetration in the urban areas. Also, we focused on exchange activities," Kalsi said, adding this would be a continuing process for the new fiscal.

He said the company increased its sales network by 23 per cent last fiscal to 1,619 from 1,310 in 2013-14 thereby increasing the number of cities covered to 1,290 from 980 in the previous year.

"Also we increased our service network. We now have nearly 3,100 service workshops covering nearly 1,500 cities. All these activities had helped us in achieving record domestic sales," Kalsi said.

He said last fiscal new launches like the Ciaz and Alto K10 and refreshes of existing models like the Swift, Dzire and had played a significant role in improving the company's sales and similar steps would follow this year too.

MSI is expected to launch its crossover vehicle SX4 S Cross and premium hatchback code named YRA this year.

The company's models Alto800, Wagon R and MPV Ertiga are candidates for a refresh in which the company will continue to increase fuel efficiency as it had done with the likes of Swift and Alto K10 last fiscal.

"Our R&D team has been consistently working on increasing fuel efficiency of our model. We did that with the new Alto K10 and Swift. This will continue in other existing models," Kalsi said.