India’s leading carmaker, Maruti Suzuki, has announced that prices of their cars will go up by two to four per cent from January, 2015. The rising input costs are cited as the reason behind this price hike by the company and we had also seen Hyundai and Nissan coming up with a similar announcement.
"We are planning to increase the prices in the range of two-four percent across our entire range of products from January. It was in October 2013 that we had taken our last price hike," Maruti’s executive director (Marketing and Sales), R S Kalsi told Press Trust of India. He also mentioned that the company had been bearing the impact of higher input cost for quite some time now, and did not hike the prices earlier owing to poor market conditions.
Saleswise, carmakers face the highest slack period during the end of the year as car sales slow down considerably. While the news of a price hike is not a good news for a buyer, the news of a hike might just take away their haggling rights (cars at the year end are sold with big discounts) as dealers make hay while the sun shines. But, well informed customers might want to wait as most of their savings will be off-set by the lower resale value of cars bought in December as compared to January.