Ever since the petrol prices have decided to start their journey to the moon, diesel cars have been finding a lot of favor from the car buying lot. One of the bread and butter models for Maruti is the Swift diesel and the diesel variants of Swift, Ritz and SX4 have eaten into the sales of petrol brothers of these cars. Now MSIL has bumped up the dealer margins on gasoline engined cars by 8% to 10%. This move is to give a new lease of life to the fast declining petrol car sales.
Another reason for this might be the dip in market share of MSIL. For the first time, the company’s share in passenger car market has gone below 40%.
It may be noted that rival Hyundai offers as much as 7% dealer commission as compared to only 4% by Maruti. MSIL’s profits have decreased by a whopping 39% in the first 9 months of this fiscal.