Mahindra & Mahindra manufactured 1,535 units and sold 1,370 units of its latest and most high-profile passenger vehicle, XUV700, in the first month of sales – September 2021. This is only 2% of the total outstanding booking for the vehicle.
Its predecessor, XUV500, had sold 1,213 units in its first month of sales, in October 2011. The model had also seen strong booking ten years ago, and Mahindra paused taking new orders after crossing 8000 bookings in ten days.
However, the XUV700 — which has been praised by reviewers for being better in terms of refinement compared to XUV500 — has completely outperformed its predecessor, as well as nearly all its competitors, in the booking department.
The company managed to sell 50,000 bookings for XUV700 within three hours of opening its order books.
If all these potential customers continue to remain interested, that would mean that the automaker would be able to run its factories at full capacity for the next six months and still not run out of buyers for the vehicle.
On the other hand — even though the automaker has maintained that the ongoing global shortage of semiconductor chips will not affect its ramp up of production, M&M has been forced to slash production of most of its models due to this reason.
It produced only 3,052 of its highest selling model — Scorpio — last month, compared to 3,590 in the same month of last year.
It should be noted that the company had announced that it would be able to start deliveries only in October for petrol models and November for diesel models. Therefore, actual sales numbers are likely to jump to the range of 5000-7000 this month.
In September, M&M produced only 5,588 commercial vehicles, compared to 19,999 in the same month of last year, though in this case, most of this reduction in output may be related to a fall in demand for CVs.
M&M’s sales of CVs had plummeted to 9,468 in the domestic market last month from 18,907 for the same month last year.
Meanwhile, hit by the launch of new model, sales of XUV500 fell to just 160 units during the month, against its regular monthly volumes of around 1,500.