PUNE: February sales at Tata Motors, Mahindra and Mahindra and MG Motor have been hit hard by component supply constraints from China while Maruti, Hyundai and Toyota, which also reported sales decline for last month, said production schedules were unaffected till date but were closely monitoring the situation.
Vehicles sales at Tata Motors, India’s biggest firm by revenues, fell 34 per cent at 38,002 units in February, from 57,221 units sold in the same month last year. But car sales at Chinese-owned MG Motor more than halved to 1,376 units in February from 3,130 units in January while Mahindra took a sales hit of whopping 42 per cent at 32,476 units from 56,005 units sold in February 2019. Its exports dropped 40 per cent to 1,839 units in Februrary from a year ago.
Girish Wagh, president, commercial vehicles at Tata Motors said the outbreak of Covid-19 virus in China and a recent fire incident at one of its strategic vendors affected the vehicle production and wholesale volumes.
“The ramp-down of BS-IV vehicle production has been in line with our plan for February. However, because of the unforeseeable challenges on the parts-supply from China, our BS VI ramp-up has been affected,” Veejay Ram Nakra, chief of sales and marketing, automotive division at Mahindra and Mahindra, said.
This has resulted in a high de-growth in billing volume for February and dealer inventory is now under 10 days, he pointed out.
“Going into March, we anticipate the challenge on parts-supply to continue for another few weeks, before we get back to normalcy.” Nakra said.
Rakesh Sidana, director–sales at MG Motor India, said, “The unforeseen coronavirus outbreak has severely affected our European and Chinese supply chains, disrupting our production and impacting our sales in February and will continue through March.”
He said the company was working towards stabilising the situation and is hopeful that reasonable normalcy would be restored by the end of March.
The Association of Indian Forging Industry has said that disruption in supplies due to the coronavirus outbreak in China has hit domestic forging industry along with automobile and auto component manufacturing sectors.
“We do not foresee any problem as of now. We will keep in touch with our suppliers,” a Maruti Suzuki spokesperson said.
A Hyundai spokesperson said the company was closely monitoring the situation. “However, at the moment there is no impact on the functioning.”
Similarly, Toyota Kirloskar Motor said there has been no immediate impact so far on supply of parts and its production from coronavirus in China.
“Our tier-I and tier-II suppliers are not yet effected. However, we are continuously monitoring the operations of tier-III and tier-IV suppliers to grasp any possible slowdown that may come forth due to the slowdown in logistics flow in China, especially Wuhan,” Naveen Soni, senior vice president (sales and service) at Toyota Kirloskar Motor, said.
Sales at month at Maruti Suzuki, which sells one car out two bought in India, fell 1.1 per cent at 1,47,110 units. Its exports were up 7.1 per cent at 10,261 units year-on-year. Hyundai’s sales were down 10.3 per cent at 48,910 units and its exports declined 22 per cent to 8,900 units.
Other automakers did not share their numbers till press time.
