Reflecting continued weakness in consumer sentiment, overall vehicle registrations in September 2019 fell 12.9% compared to the same period last year despite the onset of the festival season and offer of unprecedented discounts to prop up sales.
As per data from the Federation of Automobile Dealers Associations of India (FADA), a total of 13,75,314 vehicles were registered at 1,188 RTOs in the country out of 1,461 RTOs compared with 15,79,191 vehicles registered in September 2018.
These numbers do not include figures from 352 RTOs, mainly from Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh and Telengana. While AP, MP and TS are not yet on Vahan, the comparative figures for Kerala for September 2018 were not available and hence, not taken into account. On a year-on-year basis two-wheeler registrations were down by 12.1%, commercial vehicles (CV) by 18.5% and passenger vehicles (PV) registrations by 20.1%. Three wheeler registrations saw a marginal growth of 1.8%.
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Ashish Harsharaj Kale, president, FADA, said, “FADA believed September to be a transition month into positivity with continued monsoon and measure after measure being announced by the government. The retail auto industry was under pressure during the month and the de-growth was on expected lines.”
“The continued heavy monsoons in major geographies and the Shraddh period also contributed to this sales lag. The complete effects of the positive measures announced by the government was still not visible at the retail level in September,” he said.
He said October would be a crucial month which would indicate the trends for H2 and measure the effects of an abundant monsoon and the various government measures announced recently.
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“Dealer confidence and current trends indicate an improving situation and if these trends hold good, it could be an indicator of the slowdown bottoming out and stability returning to auto retails,” Mr. Kale said.
FADA did not release the registration figures for August 2019 as it could not access the desired data from Vahan portal which had developed some technical glitches and the data for CVs could not be procured. However, as per July 2019 data, there was a decline of 6% in vehicle registrations at 16,54,335 units compared to with 17,59,219 vehicles registered in July 2018.