The business, which sold over 19,000 electric car units at the end of the first quarter, is also aiming to develop a distinct sales infrastructure for its electric vehicle portfolio going forward. Shailesh Chandra, the managing director of Tata Motors Passenger Vehicles, stated during an analyst call that the country’s top 20 cities are no longer the only places where EV adoption is increasing.
The fact that the prejudice is now spreading to other regions of the nation is encouraging, according to him, for the future growth of EV sales.
According to Chandra, there has been a change in the micromarkets with the introduction of Tiago EV.
In addition, he pointed out that outside of the top 20 cities, sales of the Tiago EV already account for more than 49% of total sales.
Because of this, we have utilized a shop-in-shop model to really begin extending our network in those smaller areas. We are thus developing the infrastructure for service in these places as we grow there, and we are also preparing the service engineers for those service stations. As a result, Chandra noted, “it is also a continuing process.
He also mentioned that in order to serve clients from all across the nation, the business could consider dividing the EV showrooms from the current sales locations.
In order to market EV products, the firm now uses a shop-in-shop strategy in its current dealers.
In the future, he continued, “we also want to separate ICE as well as the EV showrooms, as and when we see the volumes in certain cities go to a certain level where the separate channel becomes viable.”
Chandra stated that increased localization efforts and lower costs of next generation aggregates will lead to a considerable profit gain for the company in the EV market.
Additionally, he continued, the Tiago EV’s production-linked incentive (PLI) program and the decline in battery cell prices would contribute to the overall expansion of the EV market.
“Cell costs are returning to their pre-H1 levels, and effects should start to be noticed as early as this quarter…PLI will significantly increase the margin, and we are convinced that we are meeting all qualifying conditions established by the ministry (of heavy industries), Chandra stated.
According to him, the firm has been working on localization for the past two years, and doing so will result in considerable cost savings.
There are new generation aggregates that will also be available in this fiscal year and are priced much more affordably. Therefore, I have every confidence that the forecast for the EV industry will be quite positive over the medium term, especially this year, given the confluence of all of these elements, Chandra added.
The business plans to sell over 1 lakh EVs this year. PTI MSS HVA
