The Kodiaq Will Be Positioned Like A Skoda Which Is Accesible...

Ashutosh Dixit, director - sales, service and marketing, Skoda Auto India, talks about the new Octavia, upcoming Kodiaq and aftersales

Where is Skoda headed from here?

 Our position is to fill the gap between the mainstream brand and the so-called luxury brands, and we continue to bring products in that category. We have cars starting from ₹10 lakh going up to ₹32 lakh today and with Kodiaq we would go further up. So that is the space which we want to dominate clearly. Also the segments that we are present in, we want to be in the top three, which we do it now with Superb, Octavia and we are quite close to doing it with the Rapid. That is really our short-term and medium-term target.

Octavia changes a lot of things for you guys. You said it’s in the top three sellers but it’s a small segment. What are the chances for the Octavia to help expand the brand and its recognition?

Octavia is the heart of the brand and globally if you see, it’s almost 40 per cent of Skoda’s volume, so it is a very very important car even in India. It has a very good history. As you said rightly, I think currently the segment size is small, however we are also optimistic about expanding our volume with expansion in the range. Our new strategy is to bring our middle variant that would be equipped enough to take on the competition and our top variant will continue to provide that exclusive high-end feature set at a very accessible price. So that way I think we are optimistic that we will expand volume even in India even in that size of the segment.

The Octavia is currently CKD in the market. So is there any plan for manufacturing the car in India or the numbers don’t support that?

The localisation is a continuous activity and we have to continuously explore what can be feasible financially to do this. Our volume is not enough to have a very high level of localisation.