With sales of around 1,000 units translating into growth of 45 per cent in the first quarter of 2016, Jaguar Land Rover has finally begun to find a foothold in the still very nascent Indian luxury car market.

It, however, remains handicapped, in a manner of speaking, on account of major gaps in its portfolio, especially in the compact luxury car space where its three main rivals — Mercedes, Audi and BMW — already have significant offerings. JLR introduced its first compact in India Jaguar XE, in February.

In a major development, the British luxury brand recently launched the F-Pace, the first SUV under the Jaguar brand, in Dubai earlier this month.

Given that the Indian passenger car market has shown a distinct shift in favour of SUVs, this could mean that the company will have more ammunition to fire.

In a conversation with BusinessLine, Rohit Suri, President, JLR India, outlines some of their plans going forward.

JLR India has seen extremely high growth during the Jan-Mar quarter. Has the XE played a major role in this growth?

While the XE gave us a power boost, the Discovery Sport (launched in Sept/Oct last year) has also been a runaway success. We also launched two more models, the refreshed RR Evoque last year and the XJ in January.

Both the XJ and XE have an edge as they offer greater boot space than its competitors as the spare tyre is under the surface. We are fortunate that our other cars also did well.

Based on April sales, how is the April to June quarter likely to pan out?

I think the momentum continues, though April is traditionally a slow month. But in terms of interest, we are seeing continuous walk-ins.

You have just launched the F-Pace, the only SUV from Jaguar in Dubai earlier this month. How soon will it come to India?

We will bring it to India towards the later half of this year.

I think with it we are carving out a new path, and the SUV will create a new segment in the market as the only comparable product is the Porsche Macan. We are expecting it will help volumes grow and add to our market share.

Though your numbers have grown, your market share in the luxury space is barely over 1%. What are you targeting? And can you upstage existing players like BMW and Audi?

When we look at the number of major players — three German companies and us, our market share is 8-9 per cent.

And this is despite having very little presence in the compact segment, which accounts for 40-50 per cent of the luxury car market.

As for upstaging BMW or Audi, before February we didn’t have a portfolio to match them in segments like the C-Class, 3-series or the A4. Nor do we have anything to match the Mercedes A and B Class or the BMW 1-series, so it is not a level-playing field.

But we are competing and still competing fair.

This year we are expecting double-digit growth, so we will add to our market share.

So can we expect more in this compact space from JLR?

These are decisions taken at the global level.

To be more cost competitive, both Mercedes and BMW build engines locally. Do you have plans to increase your localisation level?

This is continuously evolving, but it is hard to put a number to the level of localisation. I can’t comment much on this except that we are looking at some initiatives.

How much of a hit has JLR taken on account of diesel ban in NCR? How are you countering it?

Of course, it has impacted us. So we had to quickly react. The Jaguar XE comes with a petrol engine and there is a petrol variant in XJ, so to that extent it helped us. We are in the process of re-aligning some other models.

We are planning the Discovery Sport also in petrol and preparing ourselves to gear up as we can’t say whether the ban will be extended.

What are your plans on increasing the number of locally built models? Are there more investments in the offing?

We are currently assembling five models at Pune – the XS, XJ, XE, Discovery Sport and the Range Rover Evoque. We will continue to look at adding more models and with more launches there will be more investment involved.

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