 "Partho Banerjee")
Maruti Suzuki India (MSIL) has initiated the establishment of compact Nexa workshops in non-urban areas, with plans to open approximately 100 of them in 2024-25, its Senior Executive Officer (Service), Partho Banerjee, told Business Standard on Tuesday.
MSIL sells its more expensive cars such as Grand Vitara, Jimny, and Fronx through Nexa retail channel, while the others are sold through Arena retail channel.
The non-urban areas do not just include purely rural areas, Banerjee stated. "It is not as if the new compact Nexa service workshops will be opened in villages. Take the example of Ooty, where one of the new Nexa workshops is being opened. It is a hill station. As our number of vehicles there are increasing, we felt the need to open a Nexa workshop," he added.
Car sales in rural areas have seen a significant surge over the past few years. MSIL's share of total car sales in rural areas rose from about 38.5 per cent in 2019 to approximately 45 per cent in 2023.
The 100 Nexa service workshops in non-urban areas mentioned earlier will be more compact compared to those in cities, according to Banerjee. These compact workshops will occupy 75-100 square metres, whereas the typical ones in urban areas span between 1,000-1,500 square metres. Nevertheless, dealers in non-urban areas typically acquire additional land in advance, ensuring that expanding the workshop size as needed should pose no issue.
The customer service, with dedicated front office, customer lounge, service bay, and parking bay, will remain the same across all Nexa workshops, Banerjee mentioned. As on February 1, MSIL has 4,907 workshops, out of which 402 are Nexa workshops. These 402 workshops are present across 233 cities of the country.
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"We are going further down the line and would like to open our Nexa workshops in the non-urban markets too. We plan to open about 100 compact format Nexa service workshops in 2024-25 in non-urban markets. On top of that, the expansion of Nexa service workshops in urban markets will continue as usual," he mentioned.
The company has opened 343 workshops (Arena plus Nexa) to date in the current financial year. "This means that we are opening one workshop per day in India," Banerjee noted.
The first compact Nexa workshops have been inaugurated at Ateli (Haryana), Charkhi Dadri (Haryana), Bankura (West Bengal), Dahod (Gujarat), Nirmal (Telangana), and Ooty (Tamil Nadu).
