The businesses are slowly and steadily returning back to their normal pace after the restrictions imposed due to coronavirus lockdown are being eased up. The automobile industry is witnessing cancellation of vehicle bookings on a large scale. There are a lot of automakers who are sitting on a huge number of backlogs. Maruti Suzuki is one of them. Recently, the company released an internal memo to all its dealers revealing that one out of every three bookings is being cancelled. There have been various reasons given by the customers to do so.
Most of the customers who had booked vehicles in the past have started cancelling their bookings either due to the delay caused by the coronavirus pandemic or for not being able to pay the heavy EMIs. Further, this is having a drastic effect on the sales numbers of the automakers.
The huge amount of cancellations are also leading to reduced quantum of business for OEMs as they put in a lot of time, effort and money to generate the booking data. Now here booking data plays an important role as it is used by the OEMs to plan their production, allotment of vehicles to the dealerships, stock rotation among others. Cancellation of vehicles is clearly decreasing productivity and causing other inconveniences as well.
In order to control all these inconveniences caused by the cancellation of vehicles, Maruti Suzuki has authorized its Nexa, Arena, Commercial, and True Value dealers to charge an amount on cancellation. Now according to this, the dealers will be putting a charge of up to Rs 500 if a customer cancels their booking. This charge will be applicable from all the bookings done on and after August 7, 2020.
Whenever the customer is cancelling their bookings, the respective OEMs refund the full booking amount to them. Through this initiative of applying cancellation charges, the company wants to encourage prospective customers to make bookings only if they have a strong intention to do so. By no means, the company is trying to discourage people from making a purchase from them by applying the cancellation charges. This initiative is merely to get to know the real customer demand.
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