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The effects of the pandemic will be felt for a long time to come, especially given how crucial China is for global supply chains. For this edition, we’ll take a look at the automobile sales in India. Let’s dig in.
Bangalore trumps Delhi and Mumbai
2019 was not a very good year for Indian automobile industry, and by all indications, 2020 seems to be no better.
Vehicle sales in India are measured at two-points in India. One, the factory-gate sales, which measures the number of automobiles leaving the factories to the dealerships. This data is released by SIAM, an association of Indian automobile manufacturers. The other, retail sales, or vehicle registrations, measures the number of vehicles bought and registered by people from the dealerships. Both retail, as well as factory-gate sales failed to make a prolonged recovery from the economic slowdown as Indians have been spending less. With the global pandemic of Coronavirus, factories in China have also been shut for a considerable part of the 2020. This will lead to a twin-shock for Indian automobile manufacturers with both supply and demand faltering.
But amidst the slowdown, there is one development that has gone unnoticed. For the first time since 2015, Bangalore trumped both Delhi and Mumbai in the number of vehicles registered. Bangalore registered the highest ever sales while both, Delhi and Mumbai saw a significant dip in vehicle registrations amidst the slowdown (4% and 10% respectively).
Entire annual series of vehicle registrations across all vehicle types at the district-level is available to search and download on Gram, our new data product.
Bangalore led the vehicle registrations in passenger cars as well. It accounted for 7.09% of all passenger cars sold in India. Both, Delhi and Mumbai have failed to recover the number of vehicle registrations after 2017. Delhi, in fact had fewer car registrations last year than Chennai, Ahmedabad, Gurgaon and Kolkata as well.
One area where Delhi led though, was in adoption of Bharat Stage-VI vehicles. With the mandatory rolling out of BS-VI norm vehicles set for April 2020, this is positive signs for automobile dealerships in the capital region.
In other news
The world in the next two weeks will be a difficult world. Especially, with most live sporting events getting postponed or cancelled. Ahead of the Indian Super League final that will now be played behind closed doors, we looked at which team has been the best performer this season. Read here.
We take a monthly data dive into how cities are doing in 8 aspects that define quality of life for a citizen. Check out this month’s dashboard in Hindustan Times for Gurugram and Jaipur.
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