Move to help carmaker achieve sales target of two million units by 2020
Maruti Suzuki has become the first carmaker in India to invest directly in building sales and marketing infrastructure, as the company expands its already-wide network with an aim to attain the 2020 sales target of two million vehicles, a top executive said.
The Indian unit of Japan's Suzuki Motor is working on a multi-format model, where some of the retail outlets will be created and leased out to dealers by the company, while the rest will be built by the dealers themselves as is the norm in the sector.The company also launched a new branded sales channel, NEXA, on Thursday to sell its premium cars.
“We have already started some Maruti dealerships at premium locations across major metros and we are also planning to buy land across India to assist our dealers to start new outlets,“ RS Kalsi, Maruti's executive director for marketing and sales, told ET.
Maruti, which has annual domestic sales of 1.17 million cars, has already invested in half a dozen central locations in Delhi and Mumbai. These premises located in prominent markets, malls as well as Metro stations have been leased out to its dealers to operate branded showrooms. The company currently has around 1,650 outlets owned by its dealers.
The nation's largest car maker, with more than ` . 8,000 crore of cash reserves, plans to create a real-estate bank by buying land across towns and cities, which it would develop and also lease out to deal ers. This would be in addition to the NEXA showrooms, which would initially sell the upcoming S Cross sport-utility vehicle.The company said nearly 100 NEXA showrooms would come up across India over the next six to eight months.
The regular Maruti Suzuki showrooms would sell models from the Alto to Ciaz, while the NEXA outlets would retail its new range of premium cars costing ` . 10 lakh or more.
“We have already initiated plans to establish regional stockyards and spare part centres across the country to beef up marketing and distribution channels. The stockyards would help the company reduce delivery and distributing time of the vehicles to the dealers and bring in more efficiency while component supplies would be enhance through regional centres,“ Kalsi said, without specifying the investment for these new marketing initiatives.
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