The Hindu Business Line : Maruti to hike capacity for Alto

The Alto has seen a sharp jump in sales this year, overtaking the company's bread-and-butter car Maruti 800 to become the largest selling car in Maruti's portfolio.

In order to meet the rising demand, Maruti is undertaking initiatives to expand capacity for the Alto at its plant.

"We are planning to increase capacity for the Alto in January 2005 by de-bottlenecking the assembly line. This will result in a 2,000 units per month increase in capacity for the Alto," Mr Jagdish Khattar, Managing Director, Maruti Udyog Ltd, said.

In July, sales for the Alto stood at 11,111 units, while only 9,554 units of the Maruti 800 were sold.

The company sold 38,997 units of the Alto and 41,428 units of the Maruti 800 in the April-July 2004 period. Demand has also soared for the Esteem, following the launch of the new Esteem at a price of Rs 4.2 lakh.

To meet the sharp increase in demand, the company will be spending about Rs 3 crore to airlift 2,000 kits for the Esteem from Japan later this month.

Though not disclosing details about Maruti's future model line up, Mr Khattar said that with demand for automatic transmission cars yet to catch up in the country, Maruti is looking to gradually exit from this segment altogether. The automatic transmission variant is available on the Zen, WagonR, and Alto.

Also, the company would be looking to push sales of the Maruti 800 through attractive finance schemes.

It has recently piloted a finance scheme called `2-se-4' in Ahmedabad and Hyderabad under which a consumer can exchange his two-wheeler for a Maruti 800.

"We have already received 1,600 enquiries under the scheme, which was rolled out about 10 days ago. However, we have found that half of the people who responded were not income tax payers. We are talking to finance companies to work out a solution to enable these people to take advantage of the scheme. We are learning from this experiment," Mr Khattar said.

Meanwhile, Maruti Udyog has ranked highest in automotive sales satisfaction, according to the J.D. Power Asia Pacific 2004 India Sales Satisfaction Index (SSI) Study released today.

The study examines satisfaction of new-vehicle buyers with the sales and delivery experience at two to six months of ownership.

Maruti over the past one-and-a-half years has increased manpower at its dealerships by almost 100 per cent to 5,400 people.

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