Pakistani OEMs’ unshakable confidence in demand is pretty enviable. Either they believe the interminable increase in prices would not damper demand at all, or they are willing to make that trade-off and forgo volumes to safeguard margins. Starting this month, Suzuki has upped its prices for the fifth time since Dec-17 when the devaluation spree first started while news for the fourth price hike by Honda and Toyota came only a few weeks ago. Both the latter companies intend on raising prices further in Jan-19. In totality, the price increase since December till January would be lowest for Suzuki Swift and go up as high as 21 percent for some models.
Here are some more numbers: the depreciation of rupee since December stands at 26 percent—so buying import of the same volume would be that much more expensive. CKD imports in the Dec-Sep period have increased by 37 percent, while volumetric sales for locally manufactured cars have gone up by 10 percent in this period. Since we do not have CKD in volumetric form, we can take total sales as a proxy—this would show that CKD per unit has grown by 25 percent in this period. Having ignored the level of localization here, and the CKD bought by new players who haven’t yet entered the market, the price increase for cars seems inevitable as CKD per unit rose.
Clearly, localization is not as high as that boasted by automakers often (some estimate an average of 55-60 percent). Even so, the level of localization does not seem to have impacted the price differential. Mehran, the most localized car in the country saw a price increase of 15 percent (or Rs108,000), while the much less localized Wagon-R also saw about the same surge in prices. Local Fortuner saw a higher price increase than imported CBU one.
Of course, one reason is that depreciation also affects auto part makers and vendors who may procure materials such as steel, plastic, rubber etc. from abroad to manufacture parts for OEMs locally. Steel commodity prices have also faced an upsurge over the past few years—coupling that with devaluation means higher costs of production for vendors and thereby, higher costs for OEMs as well. Localized cars may not see their costs go up by as much as the ones that have higher imported content, but their costs are not remaining constant.
Automakers are also likely looking at how much of the new price do the consumers have the appetite to absorb. Popular cars like Honda City, Civic and Toyota Corolla are already sold at premiums of Rs150,000-200,000 in the market by investors that buy these cars in bulks. Consumers pay the extra cost without hesitation to get the delivery of these cars on time. However, the price increase is more in the range of Rs250,000 to Rs500,000 and above across a range of these cars. Would consumers still buy these vehicles at much steeper prices plus the premium of getting the cars on time? Or would they wait for the entry of new car makers and weigh the offerings in the market?
It would be very optimistic to assume that the price increase together with the higher cost of borrowing—that undoubtedly is going up—will not impact demand. More on that later.
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