Toyota India has proclaimed that it will not foray into the small car segment of the Indian auto industry, instead the company will focus on bigger cars. The small car segment in domestic market comprise of vehicles which cost less than Rs 4lakh. Such vehicles account for 50% of the total passenger vehicles sold in India. Small car segment in India mainly interests first time buyers, currently this segment comprise of handful of cars including MSI’s Alto, Wagon R and Hyundai’s Eon and i10.
Toyota India’s current portfolio consists of just one hatchback, ‘Liva’ which was introduced in India three years ago. The vehicle is priced at Rs 4.80lakh(ex-showroom Delhi), this is also the least priced car offered by the Japanese auto maker in the domestic market. Company believes that mass segment is one genre where despite various efforts the company failed to fit in. Therefore Toyota will continue to focus more on big car segment which proffers cars likeInnovaand Corolla. Company insiders opine that dropping out from small car segment and focusing on big car segment means that Toyota is aiming at larger margins and profit.
The company has lined up a slew of launches for the domestic market which will be rolled out in the coming time. Toyota will be launching two new products including new CorollaAltisand newEtioscrossover in the next two months.Etioscrossover is based on Liva hatchback and is expected to be priced aggressively. Due to labour unrest at itsBidadiplant, there has been a backlog of these two models which is a matter of worry for the company as the launch is nearing and long waiting periods could divert bookings to other vehicles.
In last fiscal, Toyota’s market share fell by 1% to 5.18% as its Japanese counterpart, Honda inducted Amaze compact sedan in diesel avatar and recently launched new City sedan in diesel version too. Collective sales of the company dropped 22.2 % to 128,811 units. In March 2014, company’s sales declined to 9,160 units as against 21,143 units sold in the same time last year. Toyota needs to revise its current line-up and bring new vehicles that appeal to the customers; hopefully Toyota’s new strategy will work in its favour and bear fruitful results.
