'We are going to see green shoots during festive season': Partho Banerjee

India's largest carmaker Maruti Suzuki India, which has reported wholesales of 144,962 units in the month of September, registering a 3.9 percent decline (September 2023: 150,812), is confident about a buoyant festive season going forward, with a positive impact coming from a good monsoon.

According to Partho Banerjee, Senior Executive Officer, Marketing and Sales, Maruti Suzuki India, "With a very good monsoon leading to the regeneration of dams and reservoirs, a bumper harvest is likely, and therefore, we expect the money to come back into the economy. Hence, we are confident of seeing green shoots during the festive season."

With India's passenger vehicle industry struggling with slowing sales in FY25, the channel inventory at automobile dealers has risen at an all-time high, and as per Banerjee, "For the last two months, we have reduced the despatches to our dealers considerably. This has been a conscious call that MSIL has taken and we have been calibrating the despatches because we believe that wholesales and retail must match," Banerjee explained while adding that the company had an average dealer inventory of 30 days at the start of September.

"While we will not push stock to dealers, if there is more demand for vehicles from our channel partners during the festive season, we will not be depriving them," he added.  The carmaker clocked cumulative sales of 1,063,480 units in H1 FY25, and deepened its rural penetrtion from 44.3% to 47.8% in the April-September 2024 period. The rural growth was also pegged at 8.4 percent in H1.

The carmaker, which has seen a positive impact of some jazzed-up limited edition variants like the Brezza Urbano Edition and Fronx Velocity Edition, on the sales of its respective models, says that the marketing interventions have worked in favour of the company, and helped some of these products achieve their best-ever sales numbers, and that it would continue offering these options to customers well into the festive season as well. "The sales of the Brezza emerged as their best-ever in August at over 19,000 units," Banerjee highlighted in this video interview.