Maruti Suzuki says small car segment to grow in volume terms

Country's largest carmaker Maruti Suzuki India expects the small car segment to grow in large volume despite a decreasing share in the overall domestic passenger vehicles market, Maruti Suzuki India Ltd Senior Executive Director - Marketing & Sales, Shashank Srivastava told PTI. He said that though affordability is a major concern in the small-car segment, Maruti Suzuki is betting big on the first-time buyers and more customers from rural as well as suburban areas such as Tier II and III towns.

Srivastava added that the hatchback market used to fluctuate between 45-46% of the total passenger vehicles market for the last five years whereas in 2021, it dipped about 38 per cent whereas SUVs with 40 per cent of the overall market share became the largest-selling segment. However, in terms of absolute volume, Srivastava said the small-car segment is still pretty large. "Roughly if you look at the last fiscal's full-year volume of about 30.7 lakh, 40 per cent of that is hatch. It was just under 12 lakh last year. The market for SUVs last year was 12.3 lakh. So, there is not a very large difference in terms of volumes," he said.

Commenting on why Maruti Suzuki is so bullish on the small-car segment, Srivastava said that the country's projected economic growth for the future propelling the requirement for transportation, a young population and a stream of youth coming into the workforce every year act as favourable factors. “We are still not a high GDP per capita country where people straight away go into a large car or a high price car," he added.

He added that the affordability factor of vehicles have come down with prices of the vehicles going up due to various factors such as compliance of new regulations like emission and safety norms, increase in commodity prices and addition of new features to the cars.