India auto sales down 13%, industry retreats by six years in pandemic business-standard.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from business-standard.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Strong March quarter show restricts automobile sales decline in FY21 to 13.6%
Yet, this was the second straight year of double-digit decline in the auto industry. The low base helped prop up numbers in one quarter but makes the narrative even more worrisome for the full year
Sumant Banerji | April 12, 2021 | Updated 21:24 IST
Malaise in auto sector is structural
A strong rebound in the last quarter, where sales jumped nearly 26 per cent over last year, restricted overall decline in sale of automobiles during a pandemic-hit fiscal 2021 to 13.6 per cent at 18.6 million units.
In a year where at least two months of sales was lost due to the lockdown in April and May last year, it could have been much worse. Industry body Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM) had at the start of the fiscal in April 2020, when the pandemic was still fresh, said sales could potentially shrink by over 20 per cent to just 15.5 million units. The relatively modest decline was part of its mo
Read more about Covid-19 pandemic washes out 6 years of growth in auto sales: SIAM data on Business Standard. The decadal growth in the auto industry has now slowed from 12.8 per cent to 1.8 per cent, indicating there is a lot more to the slowdown
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Automobile companies posted exponential growth in their year-on-year wholesale numbers in March mainly because of the low base effect due to Covid-related disruptions last year.
In the passenger vehicle segment, market leader Maruti Suzuki India Ltd (MSIL) reported despatch of 1,46,203 units in the domestic market in March compared with 76,240 units in the same month last year. However, on a yearly basis, its sales fell by more than 8 per cent to 12.94 lakh units compared with 14.14 lakh units in 2019-20.
“Domestic sales in March 2020 had dropped about 48 per cent due to Covid-19-related disruptions. However, domestic sales in March 2021 have only recovered to March 2019 levels,” the company said.