As mentioned before, this is the highest ever profit achieved by the company in India and one of the key reasons for this success was the sales of the Baleno premium hatchback and the newly launched Vitara Brezza subcompact SUV. In fact, Maruti Suzuki has sold over 1 lakh units of the Baleno hatchback in India ever since the launch of the car in October 2015 and over 50,000 unit of the Vitara Brezza that went on sale in March 2016.
RC Bhargava and Kenichi Ayukawa
According to Bhargava, every car in Maruti's lineup is right now adding to the company's profits and that is mainly because the capacity utilisation was over 100 per cent. That said the company still has a backlog of about 50,000 units of the Vitara Brezza, which company hopes to deliver by the end of this year.
In the second quarter of 2016-17, the Company sold a total of 418,470 vehicles, accounting for a growth of 18.4 per cent over the same period of the previous year. While sales in the domestic market stood at 383,030 units, a growth of 18.5 per cent, exports were at 35,440 units, up 17.9 per cent. During Q2, the company registered Net Sales of Rs. 17,59,460 lakh seeing a growth of 29.5 per cent over the previous year. In fact, RC Bhargava said, this was the "Best quarter for the company" ever.
Sale during the H1 of 2016-17 FY accounted for the sales of a total of 766,913 vehicles, registering a growth of 10.4 per cent. The domestic sales, at the same time, stood at 705,370 units a growth of 12.1 per cent, whereas exports accounted for 61,543 units. Bhargava did feel that foreign exchange has had a slightly negative impact on numbers, though. The Company's net sales stood at Rs. 32,28,060 lakh in April-September 2016-17, which brought a growth of 20.9 per cent over the same period last year.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
