Scooters narrow gap with volume leader bikes to just 1% at 35%

With just one percentage point gap with entry-level bikes segment, automatic scooters are set to overtake the largest volume segment in the two-wheeler market that now controls only 36 per cent of the pie, sooner than later.

If the April sales trends are any indication, the time is not far off when automatic scooters will dominate the two-wheeler industry, say industry observers.

The optimism comes from the fact that led with a 63 per cent of the overall market pie in scooters space, Honda Motorcycle & Scooter India (HMSI) has been leading the market growth for many years by a wide margin for many years now.
 

And HMSI has been contributing more and more to the industry growth, with April alone seeing it chipping in with 89 per cent of the incremental volume by selling over 3.6 lakh units.

Scooters had only 19 per cent of the market in fiscal 2012, when 110cc bikes had 47 per cent, which jumped to 32 per cent for scooter but declined to 37 per cent for bikes in fiscal 2017 and in April further narrowed to just 1 per cent.

This means that in flat six years, led by Honda, the contribution of automatic scooters zoomed to 35 per cent in April, while 110-cc bikes share declined from 49 per cent to 36 per cent in the same period.

While HMSI saw scooters sales growing 40 per cent in April, the scooter segment as a whole clipped at only 25 per cent, while the bikes sales were flat and moped degrew 14 per cent. This has had Honda automatic scooters chipping with a whopping 89 per cent of the market volume in the month.

"With our record sales in April, we are now driving the biggest evolution of two-wheeler industry in the country. We are sure of scooters overtaking the bikes to become the largest segment some time down the line, we cannot offer an clear timeline.

"Our optimism comes from the rising demand for scooters in rural markets and also cities and already in many states scooters are the largest segment," Yadvinder Singh Guleria, SVP for sales & marketing at HMSI, told PTI today.

He said Honda saw record volumes for automatic scooter at 3,68,550 units in April, clipping at 40 per cent, much faster than the segment growth of 25 per cent. Interestingly, 89 per cent of new automatic scooter volumes came from Honda alone, taking our market share to an all time high of 63 per cent, which is gain of 6.6 per cent.

It can be noted that its flagship 125cc Activa for the first time overtook motorcycles to become highest selling two-wheeler brand in the country in fiscal 2017, unseating the Splendor from Hero Motor Corp.