By September-October 2012, the monthly production capacity of the best selling XUV 500 from India's leading Sports Utility Vehicle (SUV) manufacturer, Mahindra & Mahindra, will be raised to 5,000 units. This step has been taken to manage the demand and supply equilibrium after the nationwide booking for the model commenced last week. Earlier, Mahindra increased the capacity to 4,000 units in the month of May 2012.
Chief Executive Officer, Automotive Division, M & M, Pravin Shah, said, "We have been gradually increasing the production of XUV500. It has touched 4,000 units a month now and the next step is to take it to 5,000 units by September-October."
The car maker has re-opened the bookings for the car this month and stated that the vehicle will be available for sale across the nation, including the 19 cities where it was launched earlier. According to the company, the bookings for XUV 500 amount to production capacity of nine months. Since four month's production inventory of 8,000 units was sold within 10 days, the company suspended new bookings of the SUV, which was launched on 29th September, temporarily in October. During that period, the car was available only in major cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai and Pune.
Mahindra re-opened bookings for just 10 days in its second phase across 19 cities in the countries, from 25th January. It received 25,000 applications in the second phase and a lottery system was used to select 7,200 out of the total applications. The vehicle comes with an ex-showroom price tag ranging between Rs. 11.58 lacs and Rs. 14.11 lacs in Delhi. Speaking of sales growth in this fiscal, Shah stated that the company is already looking to go beyond the 10-12 per cent sales growth expectations for the whole industry set by Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturer (SIAM)
Earlier, Shah said, "In the next couple of months, we will have our compact SUV and by the end of the year, we will launch the sub-four metre Verito. These new products will enable our sales grow further this fiscal."
The Mahindra Group grew by 26.84 per cent, with sales volume of 79,237 units in the months of April-May 2012 against 62,508 cars sold in the same period last year.
