Navratri Delight: Car and bike sales boom on first day

New Delhi: Navratri is herere and just what the expectation was with the auto industry, the auto industry has seen a huge spike in its sales numbers on its first day itself. Following poor sales in the month of August, the first day of the Navratri saw a good spike in numbers, coinciding with the day that GST 2.0 was rolled out, which has marked a price reduction for most carmakers. 

Leading automakers like Maruti Suzuki, Hyundai, Tata Motors and Hero MotoCorp, who have gotten the best version of the GST benefit with their own incentives to customers, have seen a huge demand as told by the executives of the companies and their dealers. 

Footfalls at the dealerships were in fact, higher on Monday, as was noted by ET Auto. More than 150 deliveries are scheduled, which is almost five times more than the daily average across the three Maruti Suzuki Arena showrooms of Pasco Group in Gurugram on the first day of Navratri itself. Chairman of Pasco Group, Sanjay Passi, has said that the GST cut has worked a charm for them, with demands for small cars increasing. 

The surge isn’t limited to just the big cities, and the wave is surely going to be riding up to the small towns and cities as well. It has been noted that even in small cities, the football and enquiries for cars and two-wheelers have gone up, and the Navratri sales are expected to be more than before. 

In Navi Mumbai, a lot of prospective buyers were seen visiting a Maruti Arena outlet with a target of booking four times a normal day, said a sales-in-charge of the dealership to ET Auto. 

Partho Banerjee, senior executive officer (marketing and sales) of Maruti Suzuki, has said that the company has received a brilliant response, with the company expecting the numbers to be around 30,000 cars on Monday. The company has had 75,000 bookings since September 18th, when they announced additional incentives beyond GST cuts, with almost 15,000 bookings daily, which is 50 per cent higher than average.

Even SUVs have commanded good demand, with Kia India getting a dealership in South Mumbai, telling ET Auto that they were expecting 10-12 per cent in festive sales leading up to Diwali.

Whole-time director and chief operating officer at Hyundai Motor India, Tarun Garg, has said that the company saw around 22,000 ealer billings, their highest single-day record in the last five years. He reiterated that it was festive sentiment, along with the GST cuts, that had punched confidence into the customers. 

Tata Motors are also seeing a rise. Amit Kamat, chief commercial officer, Tata Motors Passenger Vehicles, has said that the GST cut and festive offers have seen a rise in enquiries and bookings for Nexon and Punch. They have better conversions from their walk-ins, he concluded. 

In Chennai, the Hyundai dealer too reported a 50 per cent hike in bookings while Maruti Suzuki clocked steady orders since the weekend. 

Hero MotoCorp, dealership’s  Globa Enterprises’ GM sales Sudhar Mehta said that the company is expecting to deliver somewhere around 1000-1200 units on Monday. Even Royal Enfield’s largest dealer in Delhi, Lamba Enterprises, has said that they were expecting to deliver 180 units on Monday itself, which is double the 100 units they usually sell in festive periods.

It is an expected outcome with industrial experts predicting the sales traction will eventually lose traction after the initial burst of the festive season.