Maruti Suzuki, India’s largest car maker is relying on Swift, its overhauled hatchback for enhancing its sales and making the festive season more joyful as it is faced with the worst kind of labor crisis for over 10 years and is quite distressed with the burgeoning competition.

The car is scheduled to be launched on August 17 and the company is expecting an increase in the market share by at least 5% with this new car.

The company has estimated that over the years their market share in the premium A2 segment has got marred and has declined by 25% points by making it less than 50% from 75% in last two and a half years. They are expecting their share to go up by at least 53% in a time span of next few months once the new Swift gets launched, said Shashank Srivastava, the chief general manager (marketing) of Maruti Suzuki.

Maruti depends on the A2 plus segment a lot as their market share in the small car section has risen to 19% in the first half of this fiscal from mere 8% in the year 2007-08. Interestingly, this segment got a growth of 63% in the last fiscal whereas the overall passenger car sales got only a 30% growth which got 48% market share to Maruti with the sales of 2.1 lakh units in the last fiscal.

The company also acknowledges this section to be the most crucial one for its growth. In the last three fiscals, Swift has seen a jump in the sales by about 60% with the sales of 1.4 lakh units. This segment is presently dominated by Maruti’ Swift and Ritz; Honda’s Jazz; Ford’s Figo; Hyundai’s i20; Nissan’s Micra; and Toyota’s Liva.

However, it is found that Maruti Suzuki’s share has dropped by29.3% points from 4% points with sales of 55,651 units in the April-June period of 2011-12. Its total sales have gone below Hyundai’s Getz, i10, and i20 during this period.

The ten days long strike that it faced at its Manesar unit led to a loss of above 12,000 units, this even led to a sharp drop in its sales. The company has been facing really lot of pressure but it has high expectation with its new Swift as it started on a positive note with total bookings of about 30,000 in the second week itself.

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1. Maruti To Reinvigorate Product Portfolio, Plans To Launch New Swift Next year
2. Maruti Suzuki Offering Great Discounts to Magnetize Sales
3. Maruti Suzuki Confronted Diminishing Sales for the July Month
4. Bookings for New Maruti Suzuki Swift Reached 25,000 Mark and Still Prospering
5. Maruti Suzuki Un-wraps Its New Swift @ Rs. 4.22 Lakh