With customers unwilling to wait long for a car they booked to buy, market leader Maruti Suzuki India Ltd has started work on setting up vehicle stockyards in various parts of the country to bring down the waiting time on its best selling cars. The first such stockyard will be set up within the
next six months in Bangalore, acquisition of land for which is already over.
Some of its cars like Swift, its sedan version Swift Dzire and the people mover Eeco enjoy a waiting period of almost four months. With the company struggling to meet the demand, rivals like Ford and GM have been looking to lure customers unwilling to wait that long. The company has earmarked a corpus of Rs. 200 crore for setting up these stockyards and model showrooms around the country.
“The intention is to set up at least one stockyard in each of the zones, North, South, East and West. Such a concept is important for a vast country like India and will reduce the waiting period for the customers,” said a company official. “Very often there is a mis-match between the variant and colour of a particular car that a customer wants and the car that is available at the dealership. Setting up regional stockyards will increase availability of the cars and reduce time of transportation.”
The yards, which will be spread over 25 acres of land, will also help in reducing the working capital requirement of dealers as the need for maintaining a large fleet at the dealerships will come down.