Maruti Suzuki To Significantly Increase Vehicle Prices From April

The country's leading car manufacturer Maruti Suzuki India (MSI) on Monday said it will significantly increase price of its whole product line from April in order to make up for the high input costs.

Maruti Suzuki To Significantly Increase Vehicle Prices From April

Shashank Srivastava, MSI Executive Director (Sales and Marketing) said to PTI that "we had emission norm conversion from April last year. It involved a lot of costs so we had thought that we would increase the prices but somehow the market situation last year wasn't so great so we did not increase prices at that time. But now input costs have increased dramatically, especially of the raw materials like steel, plastic and the rare metals,"

Further he added that in order to compensate for the effect of the rising cost, the company went for a price hike of its product range in January this year.

"We were trying to stimulate demand after the pandemic and that is why we kept the price hike in January to a very small amount hoping that the input costs would nor remain high and come down. But the projections now are that the raw material cost would remain high in the next few quarters. It is therefore with great reluctance we have decided to increase the prices from April," noted Srivastava.

The quantum of the price hike for the company's product range would depend on the models. "We are figuring out the exact number but there will be a substantial increase because the cost has gone up due to emission and safety norm changes," Srivastava said.
In 2019-20 and the ongoing fiscal year, the company did not passed the rising input costs to buyers of the vehicles.

In a regulatory filing, MSI said that over the past year, the cost of the company's vehicle range has been impacted adversely owing to a spike in different input costs. "Hence, it has become imperative for the company to pass on some impact of the above additional cost to customers through a price increase in April 2021," added the filing.

In mid-January this year, the company announced increase in price of select models by up to Rs. 34000 owing to a rise in input costs.

With PTI Inputs