The sales of domestic automobile manufacturers continue their slow and steady march towards more stable sales in a less volatile market. Each one of them, except Mahindra and their Logan, recorded positive sales in June 2009. Cumulative sales growth for the first quarter on the other hand has thrown up a mixed bag of results as the industry looks ahead to what the Budget has in store for them.

In the passenger car segment, market leaders Maruti Suzuki are the only major players to record double-digit growth. They sold 61,583 units in June 2009, a 10.17 per cent growth over the same period last year when they sold 55,899 units. Maruti also had the strongest cumulative sales growth for the period of April-June 2009 (Q1) selling 1,96,032 units, a 9.65 per cent increase over the 1,78,777 units sold in Q1 of 2008. Hyundai Motors India Limited (HMIL) continues to gain ground over an increasingly distant third Tata Motors selling 23,016 units this June. They had sold 21,881 units in June 2008 thereby registering a 5.19 per cent growth. The company’s policy to aggressively push exports over domestic sales has seen them record alternately positive and negative sales for 9 months now and volatile domestic sales have taken a toll on the company’s cumulative sales which grew by a mere 1.29 per cent in Q1 2009 with sales of 68,766 units against sales of 67,892 units in Q1 last year.

Tata Motors continues to do poorly and just managed to break even this month with a growth of 0.13 per cent. The company sold 17,017 units in June 2008 and only managed to sell 17,039 units in June 2009. In addition, cumulative sales for Q1 09 have declined by 10.28 per cent over Q1 08 given that sales during those periods were 45,837 and 51,094 respectively.

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