We have increased market share, exceeded pre-Covid levels: Tata Motors

We had pretty robust growth both in terms of first-time car buyers from smaller towns but also upgraders and probably people getting their second car into the household in the bigger towns, says Vivek Srivatsa, Head, Marketing - Passenger Cars, Tata Motors.

What kind of targets are you expecting during the festive season?
Fortunately ever since the unlock has begun around the middle of June, there has been a consistent increase in demand for passenger cars and it has sustained pretty well through the last four months. The first indicator of festival season is how Onam performs. It has traditionally been the first festival across the country and this year Onam has performed very well overall for the industry and particularly for us at Tata Motors.

For Tata Motors we have had sustained demand across all five of our products. We launched a completely new range of five BS-VI ready products in January and fortunately we have demand for all five so much so that the most of our production is being lapped up. Considering the farmers community has been blessed with a good monsoon, agricultural production seems to be going really strong, the harvest season is performing well. Now on the back of these factors, we are expecting a fairly good festival season.

What are the current dealer inventory levels in the channel and how are you looking at timely delivery?
For Tata Motors, our dealership inventory is a shade below what we would like it to be at an ideal level. But it is a good problem to have. We are trying to ramp up production and take care of our bookings. As a result, our customers are having to wait a little longer than they would like.

We are doing all that we can including ramping up production. Of course, all our three plants are accelerating the factory forward kind of transportation to the dealers as much as possible, getting into daily work management to see how fast we can produce and dispatch the cars.

The dealer stock levels are a shade below what we would like. However, we are ramping up our processes and operations to ensure that customers get the deliveries on their favoured time in terms of auspicious days or in terms of specific days they would like to get it. Also we have a pretty good mechanism of informing the expected date of delivery at our dealerships. Customers are informed well in advance of when they can expect their cars.

Which are the key geographies you are going to be focussing on? Is there a case of increased demand from metros or perhaps tier II or tier III cities? Also, what about the rural end of the market?
Traction seems to be pretty consistent across both tier I, tier II and smaller markets. The good indicator again would be Kerala with Onam as a base case. We had pretty robust growth both in terms of first-time car buyers from smaller towns but also upgraders and probably people getting their second car into the household in the bigger towns.

It is also a specific case for us in terms of the kind of product range that we have. We have a fairly spread product range right from hatchback which traditionally is called the entry hatch and Tiago going up to a mid SUV of the Harrier, a pretty wide price band. It would not be an accurate parameter to gouge where the demand is coming from.

But looking at the flow of bookings, I would say demand is fairly uniform across the different town classes. However, in terms of offers, that is where we really have made a slight differentiation between a bigger town and a smaller town. We have seen that post the pandemic, there has been a huge demand uptick for personal transportation owing to the safety that is involved and by and large people are looking at ease of entry into car ownership and hence our marketing has largely revolved around two areas.

One is to assure the customers that it is very safe to actually visit our showrooms and experience our test drives. We have a very elaborate process called Sanitized by Tata Motors in place which actually sanitizes at every step of the customers journey. Secondly, in terms of ownership, our focus has been largely on making ownership accessible and very aggressive EMI offers, finance options, ease of finance availability have been the focus.

Are you back to your pre-Covid levels and if not, how soon do you think you will be able to reach that mark?
Overall, as an industry, we are on par with pre-Covid levels but specifically for Tata Motors, we are happy that we have exceeded pre-Covid levels. This is quite visible by our market share increase. We have grown our market share substantially compared to pre-Covid levels. Demand is continuing to be strong and it is to some extent, exceeding supply in the ensuing period. In terms of customer behaviour, there’s quite a lot of change. There is increased focus on safety. Most of our cars are four star or five star rated in the global end cap rating scale. Customers have really shown preference for our range right from Tiago, Tigor, our compact SUV the Nexon as well as our latest premium hatch the Altroz.

The other area of difference being that we see a lot of family involvement in car purchase now and hence the design appeal is becoming stronger. It is more of a unified purchase decision today than it was earlier and inputs from women are higher than ever and hence we see a strong orientation towards appealing design and also comfort features are coming very strongly to the fore. I can substantiate this by saying that our premium Altroz is hugely lagged because of the 90-degree opening doors that it provides and the flat floor. These are features that customers are quite fascinated by. So there is a slight change in customer behaviour with far more orientation towards safety and design.