ISLAMABAD: As car sales have decreased drastically due to a slowdown in economic activities, documentation process and rising inflation, the local assemblers have raised the prices of various models of their cars during the last 12 months.
According to documents available with this scribe, Pak Suzuki Motor Company (PSMC) has increased the prices of its vehicles by up to Rs1.5 million during January -December 2019.
As per the data, the price of Mehran VX was raised by Rs50,000 during the last 12 months, while that of Mehran VXR jumped by over Rs63,000 during the same period.
Currently priced at Rs1,745,000 (as of December 2019), Cultus VXR registered an increase of over Rs335,000 in the past 12 months, whereas the price of Cultus AGS surged by Rs337,000 to Rs1,975,000.
The highest increase in price among Suzuki car models was witnessed in the Swift DLX variant, as it surged by Rs440,000. The car was priced at Rs155,5000 in January 2019.
Meanwhile, Swift DLX AT, which was available in the market at Rs2,050,000, registered an increase of Rs359,000 in the past 12 months. The price of the same model in January 2019 was Rs1,691,000.
Wagon-R VXR and Wagon-R VXL registered Rs381,000 increase in the last 12 months, currently standing at Rs1,605,000 and Rs1,695,000, respectively.
The new price of Alto VX has been fixed at Rs1,135,000, depicting an increase of Rs136,000 since the time of its launch earlier this year. Similarly, the price of Alto VXR was increased by Rs295,000 in the last 12 months to Rs1,398,000.
Among other variants of PSMC, Suzuki Jimny was the one which registered the highest increase in the past 12 months, surging by Rs1,497,000 to stand at Rs3,990,000. The same car was available in the market at Rs2,493,000 in January.
The price of Suzuki Bolan registered an increase of Rs225,000 in the last 12 months, while that of Suzuki Ravi increased by Rs203,000 in one year.
According to sources in the auto industry, the major reason behind the jump in prices was the depreciation of Pakistani currency against US dollar. However, they observed, the price of US dollar has decreased below Rs155 as compared to Rs164 on June 24, which signals declining cost of import.
The overall car sales plunged 44pc to 49,110 units during the first five months of FY20, as demand for various cars slumped by around 35-75pc.
Car assemblers and their vendors had claimed achieving up to 70 per cent localisation, but pushing up prices despite stability in the exchange rate since June has nullified their claim.
Assembling/manufacturing of automobiles is being carried out for the last more than 20 years. If annual
deletion @ of only 5% was achieved then today we could have 100% locally made vehicles but that is not the case. Why?????????