Mahindra has lost some market share in the utility vehicle segment, Pawan Goenka, MD, Mahindra & Mahindra, told ET Now in an interview. He also added that the company will launch a new platform to increase its market share.
Edited Excerpts:
Has Mahindra’s market share in utility vehicles decreased?
The market share that we had several years ago was very high when we were in situation of UV (utility vehicles) not being highly competitive and today every major player in India has 1 or 2 UV products (in their kitty). We have obviously six or seven and therefore it is natural to expect that the market share will not remain at that level. Having said that, we are not comfortable with our current market share. We would like it to go up few percentage points and the only way to do that is to have the right product, the right price for the customer.
We have right now six-seven products. Some of these products are doing well. Some did not do very well. We are working on how to make those products perform better in the market place and we are very confident that this year we will see that that change happen. In addition, we are launching one brand new platform during this year which hopefully will give us significantly new number, and not take away from the current product. We will launch two or three (products) during the year. This year we certainly should see an increase in market share in the UV segment for Mahindra.
We had the diesel ban, then we had BS-IV but still the industry grew. Now how are you looking at this fiscal expecting that there is going to be a smooth ride? Are we looking at double digit growth this fiscal in terms of the industry?
Last year in spite of many headwinds, we had three or four major things that had negative impact on the industry. Actually passenger vehicles had the best growth in six years last year at 9.2%. However, last year was a very high growth year for UVs, 29% for UVs. We think the UVs will sort of come down to a growth of 10-11-12%.
