Date:15/10/2004 URL: http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/2004/10/15/stories/2004101502360200.htm

Back Corsa Swing slows, but GM to keep pushing

K. Giriprakash

Bangalore , Oct. 14

ITS monthly sales is in single digit for quite sometime now, but its parent General Motors says that it will continue to push the Opel Corsa Swing brand for as long as possible.

In June, General Motors sold a single unit of Swing but since then it has recovered to sell 14 units in September, still four short of the September 2003 figures.

Sales of other Opel brands are not exactly encouraging either. Opel Corsa's sales for the first six months (April-September 2004) dipped by 5 per cent to 2,858 units compared with the same period the previous year while that of Corsa Sail decreased 22 per cent to 1,591 units. Swing's drop in sales was as much as 78 per cent to 41 units.

But these figures have not deterred General Motors from claiming that Opel brands will in fact do better this year than 2003. It had attributed production constraints as one of the reasons for the poor sales earlier.

General Motors expects Opel Corsa to sell around 7,000 units during the year and Corsa Sail to sell 3,000 units. The company recently reduced prices of Opel Corsa by around Rs 36,000 and expects this will push up sales of the model. But an official of the car maker was tight lipped when asked whether the price reduction had led to the desired effect of pushing up the sales.

Before the price cut, sales had been averaging 500 units a month, and General Motors expected the price reduction to increase the sales to around 700 a month. Corsa's new price strategy is seen as GM's move to position its model quite aggressively in the C-segment, which saw the largest growth of nearly 51 per cent in 2003-04 among all segments. This segment contributed 20 per cent of the country's car sales of nearly 7 lakh units in 2003-04.

GM India's President and Managing Director, Mr Aditya Vij, had earlier said that there has been a renewed demand for the German-engineered Opel Corsa. This had prompted the company to increase the projections for 2004. He said that the assumption that sales of Corsa Sail had declined was misplaced as the concept of a premium hatchback car is catching on in India.

Among its other models, for the first six months of 2004, Optra sold 4,487 units, Tavera - 4,072 units while the CBUs, Vectra sold 32 units and Forester, 45 units.