March Automobile Sales Accelerate while the Fiscal Sales Broke Down!
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While the sale of vehicles increased for March, we see an overall decline in sales for the year ending 2021!
Total domestic passenger vehicle sales in March rose by 115%, reporting a sale of 2,90,939 units compared to 1,35,196 units in 2019!. The data does not include the sales of Tata Motors as the company stopped sharing the data with SIAM the reporting company. Tata Motors has reported a sales jump of 500% of which the Passenger Vehicle segment grew by 422.4%!
Two-wheeler vehicles which indicate the health of the rural economy saw a rise of 73% with 15 lakh units compared to 8.5 lakh units in 2019. This extraordinary increase in sales of Passenger Vehicles is due to 2 major reasons – one being the lockdown which was introduced in March of 2020 due to COVID 19 when car manufacturers had started lowering the supply of cars by mid-March itself. The other reason was a shift to the BS-VI engine from the BS-IV engine which made companies pull back their stock leading to falling inventories in the year 2020.
While the sales of March show a great increase the true image of the automobile industry can be seen with the fall of 2.24%. Two-wheeler as indicates the health of rural India saw a decline of 13%, three-wheelers saw a decline of 66.06%, and commercial vehicles fell by 20.77%.
Hence an overall decline of 13.6% was seen in the fiscal year. The reason obviously being the pandemic. Though the cases are again on the rise and India has officially entered the second wave, expectations say that the growth in sales of the automobile industry will continue. Companies like Tata Motors, Kia Motors, Hyundai, and Maruti Suzuki are working in their full capacity and many of their models are even in a waiting period of 2-4 months.
How do you think will Indian Automobile Industry react to the second wave?
