‘Next year we should be back to 40% market-share’

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Rishi Raj, Roudra Bhattacharya: Jan 25 2013, 00:47 IST

With two incidents of labour trouble and a lack of enough diesel models, the last two years have been tough for Maruti Suzuki. Though the car-market leader has been returning to normalcy in terms of production and sales, certain imponderables for the future remain. The company is trying to make more of diesel cars as customer preference has shifted towards it due to the low pricing of the fuel compared to petrol. However, with no clarity on fuel pricing policy, whether it will be fully deregulated in the future, the dilemma before the company is how to plan the product-mix of its future plants, especially the one planned to come up in

Gujarat. In an interview with FE’s Roudra Bhattacharya and Rishi Raj, chairman RC Bhargava discusses the market, the prospects and the challenges. Excerpts:

Auto sales have not been good this fiscal. How’s the outlook for the next fiscal and what are the triggers required for sales to pick up, apart from duty cuts, which the industry keeps asking for?

So far, nothing has made sales better than what it has been in the last few months. Duty cuts will not happen. The only thing to push demand for cars is faster economic growth and nothing else. Looks like the next fiscal will also have single-digit growth and we should be more or less at the same level. Diesel cars are already slumping, though there’s a small jump in petrol car demand because of cars like the Alto. The percentage of

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