Bajaj's Future Plans- Scooters not on Priority

In midst of the rumours for Bajaj's re-entry in the scooter space of the country, Bajaj's MD Rajiv Bajaj stated that they are concentrating more on export market of bikes than the scooters and bringing scooter will be a distracting strategy. He was giving an interview to Economic times where he said, “we have only 10% global market share in the motorcycle segment. So by no means can that be deemed to have reached a point of saturation and that is why I have always said that opposed to the recent rumours about Bajaj possibly sniffing in the scooter space, I have said at this stage getting into scooters would not be a de-risking strategy, it would simply be a distracting strategy because when you have 10% market share in one segment and incidentally profitably so, you have a lot of headroom to grow. For example, Indonesia is possibly the fourth biggest motorcycle market in the world and then there is Thailand, there is Malaysia, there is Vietnam.”

This statement doesn't reflect that the Bajaj is not going to launch any scooter in near future but he simply said that it would be a distracting decision for them. They want to focus on the motorcycles more than the scooters and it indicates that they will launch their upcoming 100cc affordable commuter bike and Bajaj Pulsar 375 first then they might go for the scooters. For their future global plan he said, “We are today the market leader in the Philippines with 45% market share between Kawasaki and ourselves. Brazil is the third largest motorcycle market in the world. Bajaj is not there and once again Kawasaki could be potentially an interesting way to get into that market. So that is one aspect. The second aspect is Africa. I said earlier that in the last month in December in Nigeria alone we sold 49,000 motorcycles. I was speaking with my distributor just last night and he is hopeful of beating that this month with a 50,000 figure and this is true in many other markets of Africa. So there is a lot of hope, there is a lot of logic why we should do well in the export markets. What will actually happen only time will tell obviously.”

So, it's clear that Bajaj is not only growing in the country but it has also emerged as a global brand and will get stronger in future.

Source: Economic Times