The country's largest carmaker, Maruti Suzuki (MSI), has become the first auto company in India to cross the 1 lakh retail sales in a month milestone, clocking 1,00,874 units sales in December 2009.
"This has been a big achievement for us, considering the fact that customers usually stay away from buying cars in year-end. In fact, we embarked on a mission to break this tendency and cross the 1 lakh retail sales," Maruti Suzuki Executive Officer (Marketing and Sales) Mayank Pareek told PTI.
The previous highest ever retail sales achieved by the company was in October 2009 at 81,800 units.
"Then (in October), we had the benefit of festival season and Diwali purchases. But to cross the 1 lakh mark in December ... 1,00,874 units to be precise ... It will take quite a while to break this record," he said.
MSI has been able to push sales in December through aggressive marketing campaigns and sales promotion besides offering discounts ranging between Rs 15,000 to Rs 30,000 depending on models.
"We adopted a strategy of three Cs -- capture, contact and convert. We rigorously pushed to bring customers to showroom and keep in touch with them till they purchased and it worked," Pareek said.
He said sales have been across all the models and also across all the different regions of the country.
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"There was no one model standing out and different markets across India witnessed good sales in December," Pareek said.
MSI sells models, including the M800, Alto, Wagon R, Zen, Ritz, Swift, Dzire and the SX4 sedan.
The company had reported dispatches of 84,804 units in December 2009, up 50.6 per cent from the same month 2008.