 "Maruti Suzuki yet to commence operations from Haryana plants")
The country’s largest car maker Maruti Suzuki, which suspended production at its two Haryana plants on Saturday afternoon, has not resumed operations yet.
Maruti and other companies in the Gurgaon Manesar auto hub have been impacted by the Jat agitation that has crippled the inbound and outbound supply chain at companies like Maruti and Hero MotoCorp.
A Maruti spokesperson said the company is waiting for the situation to improve before taking a decision to resume production. Owing to the agitation in Rohtak and nearby areas, supplies of certain components have been disrupted. As a consequence, the company had to temporarily suspend manufacture of cars. The combined output from Manesar and Gurgaon plants is currently about 5,000 vehicles per day. The plants remains closed on every Sunday.
So, with one and half days of no production, the company has taken an output hit of 7,500 units, approximately 5-6% of its monthly output. Reacting to the development, the company’s stock price at BSE declined. The stock declined 1.45% and was trading at Rs 3,529 (at 13.35pm) even though the Sensex was in green and up 0.50%.
Maruti Suzuki had seen a low growth of 0.8% in January sales. The company had attributed this to a lower number of working days last month. If the company is unable to resume production soon, its February sales growth will also be impacted.
Hero MotoCorp, the country’s largest two wheeler maker, has two of its four manufacturing facilities in Haryana’s Gurgaon and Dharuhera. While production has not been impacted, the company said it has faced challenges to dispatching two wheelers produced at these plants to the market.
Honda Motorcycle and Scooter India maintained that there has been no impact on production while it has also been able to dispatch finished products from its Manesar plant, which has a capacity to produce 1.65 million two wheelers a year. The industrial belt of Manesar is home to about 1,000 small and big plants, mostly auto and auto ancillaries and is estimated to employ 150,000 workers.