Maruti Suzuki looking at market leadership in premium hatchback car segment

The company has already seen booking of 4,600 units of Baleno

Passenger car manufacturer Maruti Suzuki is looking at market leadership in the premium hatchback car segment, with the launch of new car Baleno in the segment. The model has already seen a booking of 4,600 units so far, said the company officials.

The company is already a market leader in the A2 segment of passenger car, while there are no specific details about the A2 plus segment in which Baleno falls, said R S Kalsi, executive director (marketing & sales), Maruti Suzuki India Ltd.

Speaking to reporters in the sidelines of the regional launch of the car in Chennai, he said, "Our intend is to gain market leadership in the premium hatchback segment, but over a period of time. This cannot happen overnight. Certainly that is our aspiration and target also. Over a period of time we would like to have category leadership in the premium hatchback." However, he did not comment on the number of units the company targets to sell.

He said that the A2 segment, according to the data from Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM), the A2 segment is about 5-5.2 lakh last year data and the growth is around 22 per cent. Maruti's Swift currently holds around half of this segment.

"Already we are the market leaders in A2 segment, under which Swift comes in. This (Baleno) would be A2 plus category, which is not specified in the SIAM data. If we do further segmentation, certainly we will look at leadership in the premium hatchback," he added.

The competitors for Baleno in the segment are Hyundai i20 and Honda Jazz, according experts.

The company saw a booking of 250 per day in the first 10 days and after the launch it had more than 1000 customers visiting the showrooms and 600 bookings done on the first day of the launch, he said. Second day, it saw 3,500 enquiries and more than 1,500 bookings, he added.

Baleno would be a global car manufactured in India and it would be exported to 100 countries, starting from early 2016. The model was developed in four years with an investment of around Rs 1060 crore, including by the vendors. Localisation of the Manual Transmission version was around 99 per cent while the automatic transmission version is about 84-85 per cent.

Maruti Suzuki is looking at shifting a lot of R&D to India. It currently has a manufacturing capacity of 1.5 million cars per annum from its two facilities. A new facility in Gujarat expected to be operational by mid 2017, another 2.5 lakh would be added in the first phase, which will be later ramped up to 7.5 lakh.

The model would be sold through the company's premium showroom chain Nexa, which currently has 80 showrooms covering 42 cities and addressing 85 per cent of the market. The other dealers will help customers to buy the model from Nexa, and upon conversion of enquiry into sales, both the dealers would share the revenue. It is expected to set up a total of 100 Nexa showrooms by end of this year.

He added that the company has sold 12,000 S-Cross crossovers in three months and the sales are as per its expectations.

Baleno has an introductory price range of Rs 5.17-6.97 lakh for the petrol variant and Rs 6.36-8.34 lakh for the diesel variant, ex-showroom Chennai.