The Federation Of Automobile Dealers Association released sales data for the month of August 2022 revealing cumulative industry sales of 15,21,490 units in the month. The numbers were up year-on-year as compared to August 2021 and August 2020 though remained below the mark as compared to pre-pandemic 2019.
Commenting on how August’22 performed, FADA President, Manish Raj Singhania said, “Auto Retail for the month of August’22 saw an overall growth of 8%. August opens the door for festival season to kick in. While Dealers anticipated good Ganesh Chaturthi in August, the results thus far has not been encouraging. In spite of good monsoons, festive season began with a dampener during Ganpati. When compared with August’19, a pre-covid month, total vehicle retails fell by -7%. While PV outperformed handsomely by growing 41%, CV also turned positive by growing 6% and thus came out of the covid blues. All the other segments were in red with 2W, 3W and Tractors falling by -16%, -1% and -7% respectively.”
FADA reported a 8.31% year-on-year growth in overall sales for the month though the final numbers were down 7.45% as compared to August 2019.
Passenger vehicles however continued to see strong growth with numbers up a notable 41.35% over pre-pandemic levels while growing 6.51% year-on-year over August 2021. Maruti remained the top seller in the market followed by Hyundai, Tata, Mahindra and Kia respectively. The former two saw sales marginally decline year-on-year while the latter three saw numbers grow year-on-year.
“The PV segment continues to be on a bull run (grows 6.5% YoY) as demand for all subcategories of vehicles except entry level remained strong. This is also aided by new feature-rich launches which OEMs are doing since last few months. With semi-conductor shortage slowly becoming a passe, vehicle availability has definitely improved but waiting period continues to remain due to high demand in higher feature-rich variants,” Singhania said.
Two-wheeler sales meanwhile posted a growth of 8.52% over August 2021 with 10,74,266 units though numbers still remained below pre-pandemic August 2019. Hero remained firmly in place as the best-selling two-wheeler company in the country with sales of over 3 lakh units followed by Honda, TVS, Bajaj and Suzuki.
“While the 2W segment has grown by 8.5% YoY, it continues to face covid blues due to underperformance of Bharat and is still not above 2019 levels. This coupled with price hikes has made the 2W product out of reach for most entry-level customers. With erratic monsoon, the crop realisation has been low and flood like situation has restricted customer movement,” commented Singhania.
Commercial Vehicles were in the green as compared to pre-pandemic levels with cumulative sales of 67,158 units as against 54,107 units in August 2021 and 63,259 units in August 2019. Three-wheeler sales meanwhile posted an uptick of 83.14% over August 2021 with the number down a marginal 0.66% over pre-pandemic 2019.
