City's 'carobar' in top gear

Meghanien Dutta / TNN / Nov 18, 2005, 03:49 IST

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Dealers are delighted because car sales are shooting - the twin cities sold an estimated 20,000 cars in the last one year.

HYDERABAD: With sleek new car models hitting the market every other month and affordable finance schemes from banks, consumers have never had it so good. Car dealers, would be expected to be a happy lot.
They are and aren't. They are delighted because car sales are shooting - the twin cities sold an estimated 20,000 cars in the last one year.
But what is causing these salesmen sleepless nights is that consumer psychology is turning highly unpredictable."It is just like the stock market which goes spiralling up one day, and plummets the next day; although the long term trend is upwards," complains a car dealer.
"We can't figure out which month we will sell more and which month sales would be sluggish," he added. Alarm bells have started ringing after many dealers saw a dip in their sales during the festive season of Dasara, Diwali and Ramzan.

"Since our sales weren't high in September, we expected it to catch up in October, more so because of Dasara and Diwali. On the contrary, our sales were down by about 15-17 cars.
We are trying to figure out why this happened", says sales manager, Sundaram Honda, Vijay Sengupta. His outlet deals with Honda Citi (Rs 6.65 lakhs) which sells the most, followed by Honda Accord (Rs 14.93 lakhs) and Honda CRV (Rs 14.7 lakhs).
In line with the dictum that exceptions prove the rule, some car dealers have had a reverse experience. "In November and December - people don't buy cars, preferring to wait a few months and buy cars having the next year's date of manufacture.

But unexpectedly again, we have made 50 deliveries in the first week of November, which is a pleasant surprise," gushes T Ravindra, sales manager, Kun United Hyundai.
His outlet deals in seven brands of Hyundai, with Santro (Rs 3.41 lakhs) and Accent (Rs 5.34 lakhs) moving the fastest.
"But we had expected to sell around 250-300 cars in September, but instead our sales dropped by 50%-60%, closing a meagre 160 deals," Ravindra laments.
Some saw a drop in September as an effect of what happened the previous month. "There is generally a low level of purchase in August.
Surprisingly, this year we made an increase by around 20-25 percent, and what followed in September was an average sale," said K Sharath Babu, sales head, Orange Auto, dealers in Opel (Corsa and Sail) and Chevrolet (Optra and Tavera).
If unpredictability shadowed the later half of the year, the first half wasn't any different. "The number of Skodas we sold in February were around 27% higher than the average sale per month and we sold a lesser than estimated figure in March.
We predicted the reverse to happen," says G Pavan, sales manager, Mahavir Auto, dealers in Skoda Octavia (12.5 lakhs).
Adding to this, sales manager, Varun Motors (dealers of Maruti Suzuki) says: "Our sales during July and August moved beyond 1,000. We were not sure even if it would touch the thousand mark at all. It was more than we imagined."

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