Mumbai, Aug 31: Maruti Suzuki, the country’s largest automaker, has announced a price hike across models from September, making it the fourth such increase this year.
While the hike was minimal in the last three rounds, this one could be steeper, pushed by an exponential increase in prices of raw materials such as steel and copper, analysts said.
The company’s stock price immediately rose after the announcement, closing at 2.9 per cent higher, while the benchmark index rose by 1.36 per cent.
The company had announced its plan to hike prices for the July-September period, but it did so only for CNG models. “It has become imperative to pass on some impact of the additional cost to customers. The price rise has been planned across models in September 2021,” it said in a regulatory filing.
Maruti’s move is likely to be followed by other companies. Tata Motors had raised prices of commercial vehicles in April and July, while it raised rates of passenger vehicles by 1.8 per cent in May.
“There has been a dramatic increase in commodity prices. Normally, we try to accommodate it by increasing efficiency and productivity, so that we don’t have to pass these on to consumers. Actually, we should have taken a price hike earlier, but since we were coming out of a very bad year in 2019-20 followed by the pandemic-induced lockdowns, we focused on the topline rather than bottom line,” said Shashank Srivastava, senior executive director, Maruti Suzuki.
