Bajaj Auto Ltd., India’s second-biggest motorcycle maker by sales, plans to stop producing the Scooter in the next three months. Its managing director said They will stop their scooter production by the end of March because of lower sales in this segment. The company that by and large created the scooter market in the country through its popular ‘Hamara Bajaj’ campaigns in the 1980s and 90s, today sells just one scooter that is the 100-cc gearless Crystal. Mr Rajiv Bajaj told the reporters after the launch of 135-cc Pulsar that ‘We will exit the scooter market because we don’t see much sense in it. If we are to be a motorcycle specialist, we cannot make scooters’. Currently, we are making our Kristal scooter model for exports, which we don’t think is viable. So, we plan to exit the scooter business by the end of this financial year. The scooters did not sell according to our expectations. We are making hardly 1,000 scooters a month now and mostly for exports. Now, our focus is on motorcycles,” he said and added that the company wants to become the largest bike player in the world, without giving any specific time-frame. “One day, God willing, we will be the largest motorcycle company in the world. If we have to be a motorcycle specialist, we have to make sacrifice (in scooter segment),” he added.
According to the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers’ (SIAM), Bajaj just sold 154 units of Crystal in November and exported 104 units. Its cumulative domestic scooter sales during the April-November period was 3,356 units and 728 units overseas. Bajaj said the company has a production capacity of three million bikes annually. Bajaj Auto’s vehicle sales rose 7.3% to 686,727 units in the July-September quarter, with all its segments, including motorcycles and three-wheelers, registering growth.
Earlier in the day, the Pune-based company introduced a new version of its premium Pulsar motorcycle range with a lower engine capacity in an attempt to tap budget-conscious consumers and challenge Hero Honda and TVS Motor in this expanding market.
Bajaj Auto, which trails Hero Honda by sales volume, already sells the Pulsar with engine capacities of 150cc, 180cc and 220cc. The company also has factories at Waluj in Maharashtra and Pantnagar in the northern state of Uttarakhand.
In the 1960s, Bajaj Auto got a manufacturing license from Italy’s Piaggio and began manufacturing and selling scooters under the brand name Vespa. In the seventies, when Piaggio refused to renew its license, Bajaj began manufacturing under its own brand, like the Bajaj Chetak, which was an instant success and even witnessed black marketeering with consumers ready to pay a hefty premium to own one.
But with the market moving towards motorcycles, Bajaj stopped production of its bestselling brands like Chetak and Super in 2006 amid plummeting sales. It again entered into scooters, but tentatively, in 2007 by launching the Kristal.
By fiscal year 2008-09, Honda became the largest scooter maker, selling 654,319 vehicles in a year followed by TVS, which sold 240,000 units and Bajaj Auto, 10,000 units (about 900-1,000 a month). The number declined over the months and reached 250 in November this year.
