Brand Nexa comes into its own

INITIAL YEARS OF SLUGGISHNESS MAKE WAY FOR ROBUST SALES

- SWARAJ BAGGAONKAR

"IF I HAD my way, I'd remove January from the calendar altogether and have an extra July instead," wrote Roald Dahl. The lines must resonate with the team at Maruti Suzuki. For the first time, the number of cars that rolled out from the carmaker's Nexa chain of outlets in July this year topped the volumes sold by rival Hyundai. Compared with 52,540 cars that drove out of the Nexa showrooms, the number that customers took home from Hyundai's outlets was 50,701.

To be sure, the premium showrooms of the Nexa network, which was put in place way back in 2015, have been doing brisk business over the past year or so. By one estimate, the volumes have averaged some 45,000 a month. But it wasn't always this way. In the initial years, dealers struggled to make ends meet because the models of the time - the first generation SCross, Ciaz, Ignis and the XL6- weren't exactly setting the market on fire. In fact, had it not been for the very popular Baleno, the Nexa showrooms would have seen even fewer footfalls.

As Chirag Jain, senior analyst at Emkay Global, points out, the economics for Nexa dealers wasn't too bad since the majority of them was already running an Arena outlet; typically, Maruti invites Arena dealers to set up Nexa showrooms. But there was, undoubtedly, stress. "The Nexa dealerships were newer and more plush which meant the dealers had incurred costs. Since the models launched saw subdued demand, there was some strain," Jain said. The slowdown in the passenger vehicle sector in 2018-2019 and the pandemic thereafter in 2020, and for the large part of 2021, only added to their woes.