With 108,000 bookings, new Maruti Swift steers India’s best car launch ever

108,000 — that’s the number of bookings Maruti Suzuki India had for its Swift car as of last weekend, the highest for any car in India so far.

A saving grace for the company, which has been battling a crippling labour strife for the last few weeks even as the overall slowdown in the passenger car market refuses to abate.

To be fair, Maruti has managed to improve production to a little over 700 cars a day across its two plants. But even at this rate, customers need to wait for about five months for the petrol version and more than six months for the diesel version.

Company officials say the Swift customer is loyal and would not switch to other models. But, with the waiting period extending to six months, some switchover to rival brands cannot be ruled out.

Since the workers struck work, Maruti has tried all possible means to continue production at Manesar —- hiring 850 new ITI-trained people as contract workers, shifting some production of the Swift to Gurgaon and starting an automated weld and paint shop at Manesar before time, among other things.

It has also decided to begin making a shorter version of the Swift Dzire at Manesar to boost overall demand.

Also, faced with a declining market, the company is using freebies and discounts to generate sales of other models too.

A Maruti official said discounts are already up significantly compared with the first quarter of this fiscal —- in fact, average discounts on all of Maruti’s products now stand at 2008-09 levels. In the June quarter, average discounts were at Rs9,000-9,500, up from Rs8,000-8,500 in the year-ago quarter. In the current quarter, the discounts have shot up to Rs11,000-11,500.

Indeed, in Delhi, dealers are offering Rs20,000 cash discount for the Alto, the country’s largest selling car.

Discounts for other models too are also at the highest level since 2008-09.

Maruti officials acknowledge that the country’s largest car maker has lost about Rs1,000 crore in turnover due to production disruption and that its profitabilty would be at an all-time low. Sales too may be down 5% this quarter.

Between April and August, production was down 6.27% to 461,658 units. Domestic sales were lower by almost 17% at 77,086 units, though exports were up almost 19% to 14,356 units.