- Maruti Suzuki aims to ramp up its CNG car sales in FY25 to six lakh units from 450,000 units sold in FY24.
Maruti Suzuki India expects its CNG car sales to rise over 30 per cent to around six lakh units in FY25, revealed Maruti Suzuki India’s Executive Director of Corporate Affairs Rahul Bharti in an analyst call. Also, the largest car manufacturer in India aims to export around three lakh units of passenger vehicles in the current financial year, PTI reported quoting Bharti. It comes as a part of the brand’s strategy to produce 40 lakh vehicles per year by FY2030-31, which is almost double from current levels.
Maruti Suzuki currently holds the lion’s share in the Indian CNG-propelled passenger vehicle market, where other brands such as Hyundai and Tata Motors too sell their respective products with factory-installed CNG kits, which run on both petrol and CNG. Maruti Suzuki’s CNG fleet has vehicles such as WagonR, Brezza, Dzire and Ertiga. In an era when the cost of ownership for vehicle owners has been shooting up like never before amid sky-high fuel prices, rising inflation etc, CNG cars are finding growing popularity owing to their lower cost of ownership proposition. Maruti Suzuki being the market leader in the Indian passenger vehicle segment, is increasingly focusing on this space to boost its sales volume.
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Speaking about Maruti Suzuki’s CNG car strategy, Bharti said that in FY24, the auto company sold about 450,000 units and targets to ramp up this number to six lakh units in the current fiscal. “So CNG, this year, we did about 450,000 (units) in passenger vehicles. We are hoping to do something like 600,000 vehicles in FY24-25,” Bharti reportedly said. He also reportedly said that the company’s capacity expansion by around one lakh units per annum at its Manesar plant, in Haryana will largely address the Ertiga supply issues. Ertiga CNG demand is huge in the market leading to supply issues, he noted.
Not only the domestic market, but Maruti Suzuki is aiming to ramp up its sales in overseas markets as well. Bharti said that the company aims to export about three lakh units in FY25. “We did about 283,000 units in FY24. Despite the fact that we’ve increased substantially over the usual 100,000 units per year that we used to do just about 4 years ago. We wish to take it further in the future years. And this year, we should be doing about 3,00,000 units fairly diversified across markets, across products,” he reportedly noted.
Meanwhile, speaking about the company’s upcoming plant at Kharkhoda in Haryana, Bharti said that this project is a key part of the automaker’s ambitious growth plan. “Construction is already in progress at Kharkhoda and the first plant with an annual production capacity of 2,50,000 units is on course to be operational in 2025,” he said further adding that the company has space to set up four such plants with a total capacity of 10 lakh units in Kharkhoda.
First Published Date: 13 May 2024, 07:11 AM IST