Though there’s a dip in overall auto sales in India, Luxury car manufacturers are having a decent run by recording their highest ever sales currently.
Audi, German car manufacturers, have already registered plenty of sales in the initial 6 months of the current financial year when compared to what they did for the whole of 2010.
On the other hand, Mercedes told they’ve also recorded a sales jump of nearly 60% in six months this year of around 3800 vehicles while BMW sales had almost doubled up.
Head of Audi India, Michael Perschke, told there was no question about them not seeing a dip in the overall auto sales in India. He attributes factors like petrol prices and interest rates combined with a lot of other factors are indeed affecting sales and contributing vastly to the general slowdown.
He told the Audi effect was making the difference in their sales saying they had new engines, a strong brand name and increased their dealer market. All these make them confident about a slowdown not affecting them, but in fact would increase the product’s aspiration.
Confident with the current demands, Audi’s gone ahead and launched new cars in the Indian market.
Meanwhile, Mercedes Benz’s launched the Roadster, the price of which would be US $140,000.
Audi did introduce its A6 series whereas Volkswagen did re-launch its diesel version of Jetta Sedan in hopes of reaching a wider market.
Director of Volkswagen India, Neeraj Garg, told whenever activities like a new launch happens, there was an exponential growth to the segment. With the launch of the diesel Jetta Sedan, he felt the segment should be expanding. Taking that into perspective and going back to the earlier Jetta, they did have segment shares of around 8%.
He further told with the newness to the product, more power to the car, and with the car placed at a competitive price, they think this should enable them to improve their market shares as well.
Car manufactures voice that luxury car sector was a bit insulated from others in the auto industry due to the slowdown taking its time to really affect their customers’ profile. Though the interest rates are peaking, luxury car manufacturers have no plans of increasing their prices.