India’s largest car manufacturer Maruti Suzuki today announced that the company has increased prices of its select models due to rise in various input costs.
“The weighted average price increase in Ex-Showroom Prices (Delhi) across models is 1.6%,” Maruti Suzuki said in a regulatory filing.
The revised prices come into effect from today, i.e., Apr 16, 2021.
The company, however, has not revealed which exact models will see an upward price revision.
Maruti Suzuki had earlier in end March mentioned that it will be increasing prices in April.
“Over the past year the cost of company’s vehicles has been impacted adversely due to increase in various 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,” it had then said in a regulatory filing.
This revision in price comes in just three months, as the company had also increased its prices in January this year. Maruti Suzuki had in January hiked prices in the range of 5,000 rupees to 34,000 rupees depending on models.
“There was a conversion from BS-IV to BS-VI emission regulation as well as some safety regulations which were put in place last year in April 2020 and in October 2019. That involved a lot of costs and investment from the OEMs including Maruti Suzuki and we thought we would pass on this price in 2021. Unfortunately, the pandemic created an unprecedented situation and in the first few quarters, because of the collapse of demand, the price couldn’t be hiked at that time,” Maruti Suzuki Executive Director Shashank Srivastava had told ET Now in an interview in March.
“However, in January this year, we had to take a small price hike of about 1.3%. The reason for that was that apart from the regulatory cost increase, there was also a huge increase in raw material costs – prices of steel, plastics, rubber, copper, precious metals like palladium, rhodium all went up,” Srivastava had said.
In the interview, he had further added that the company had thought that the input cost will decrease going forward but the projections are that these costs will continue to increase and remain high for the next few quarters.
Apart from Maruti Suzuki, most other carmakers across India have been hiking prices this year, citing increase in various input costs as a reason.
