Car market leader Maruti Suzuki India (MSI) along with luxury carmakers Mercedes-Benz and Audi on Thursday said they will increase prices from January to offset rising input and feature enhancement costs.
While Maruti said the price rise planned for January 2022 will vary for different models, Mercedes-Benz India said its hike will be on select models by up to 2%.
On the other hand, Audi said its price increase effective January 1, 2022, will be up to 3%.
“Over the past year, the cost of the company’s vehicles continue to be adversely impacted due to increase in various input costs. Therefore, it has become imperative for the company to pass on some impact of the above additional costs to customers through a price hike,” MSI said in a regulatory filing.
MSI senior executive director (Marketing and Sales) Shashank Srivastava said the automaker has been under pressure since last year but avoided taking big price hikes as it would have impacted the demand scenario in the market. “This year we have taken a price increase of 4.9% in total, which is actually lower than the impact we are witnessing on account of high commodity prices,” he noted.
“We reduced our costs, increased efficiencies, but that was not enough, and eventually, we had to take price hike,” he added.
Srivastava said that the company is currently working out the quantum of the hike, which would vary from model to model.
“Considering the huge increase in commodity prices, the price hike would be substantial,” he noted.
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