Maruti Suzuki India had its Annual General Meeting for 2012 recently and there have been some hints towards Maruti Suzuki’s future strategy, revealed by Maruti Suzuki officials and sources close to Maruti Suzuki. Some of the official facts include that at present Maruti Suzuki India enjoys about 38.61% market share in the domestic passenger market and it definitely wants its share to be higher than 40% soon. Maruti Suzuki is making efforts to achieve that with its continuous efforts to bring new and useful cars in all segments. Not so long ago, we witnessed the launch of a winner from Maruti Suzuki stable, the Maruti Ertiga MPV which is selling in large numbers in India. Besides small cars, Maruti Suzuki is getting its major sales from popular cars like Ertiga, Swift, Dzire etc. In this article, we share expected road-map of Maruti Suzuki India from 2012-15.
Since Maruti Suzuki has limited number of offerings in Diesel small car segment, its sales are taking a hit because of the same. The cheapest diesel car from Maruti Suzuki at present is the Ritz diesel which sells at around Rs. 5.18 Lakhs ex-showroom which is a high price for an entry level diesel car. To overcome this disadvantage, Maruti Suzuki plans to launch more diesel cars in India across the segment. For a very long time we have been hearing rumours of Maruti Wagon R Diesel which will cost around Rs. 4 Lakhs ex-showroom, but that car is still not close to production. But we have heard repeated announcements from Maruti officials on bringing small diesel engine cars to India and we believe that Maruti Suzuki must be working in that direction.
Apart from the small cars and diesel engine options in small cars, Maruti Suzuki will also bring an updated Maruti SX4 in 2013 as revealed by some un-named sources close to Maruti Suzuki. The C segment of sedans is pretty hot in India and it is captured by some popular cars like Hyundai Verna Fluidic, Honda City, Nissan Sunny, Volkswagen Vento and Skoda Rapid etc. which are doing good sales in India while the SX4 is selling only handful of units. The reason behind the same is dated looks and no-refresh of SX4 in long time. Considering that, along with spy pictures of 2013 Suzuki SX4 leaked recently make us believe that we might soon see a new SX4 to claim its share in the Indian C-Segment sedan sales. Since the engine lineup of Maruti SX4 seems good enough, what we might see is an exterior and interior refresh with same engines tuned to deliver better performance and mileage.
If we talk of segments ahead of SX4, Maruti Suzuki practically has no presence in the SUV segment. Maruti is working aggressively to bring a compact SUV based on Maruti XA-Alpha concept showcased at Auto Expo 2012 in New Delhi India. This compact crossover SUV will compete with strong players like Mahindra Scorpio, Renault Duster, upcoming Ford EcoSport and the likes. There are also rumors that Maruti will start local assembling of Maruti Grand Vitara and price it aggressively to take on Skoda Yeti and Mahindra XUV500. Suzuki has recently revealed the new 2013 Grand Vitara aka Escudo in the International market.
The two most anticipated launches from Maruti expected to happen in Sep-Oct 2012 are:
We will keep you posted on the latest developments of Maruti Suzuki in the time to come, stay tuned to Car Blog India.
