India’s No. 1 car maker Maruti Suzuki on Monday said it would raise prices next month across its models to counter higher input costs.

The company did not specify the amount of increase in the prices, the fourth in 2021.

“With respect to price increase, we wish to inform you that over the past year the cost of company’s vehicles continues to be adversely impacted due to the increase in various input costs,” the car maker said in a regulatory filing.

“Hence, it has become imperative to pass on some impact of the additional cost to the customers through a price rise,” Maruti Suzuki said. “The price rise has been planned across models in September.”

MSI executive director (sales and marketing) Shashank Srivastava told The Telegraph that the “input costs of steel and copper have doubled since April 2020, the prices of precious metals like Rhodium have spiked from Rs 18,000 per gram to over Rs 68,000 per gram since April last year.”

“Material costs compromise 75 per cent of our total cost of production hence it is effecting us in a very strong way,” he said.

Srivastava said during the first lockdown the company did not raise prices as it expected input costs to soften. “But that did not happen. Now our profitability is taking a hit. So we had to increase prices.”

On asked what would be the range of the price hike, he said: “It’s going to be substantial across all models.”

Maruti reported a drop in profit after tax at Rs 440.8 crore in the first quarter of the current fiscal, a sharp 62 per cent decline on a sequential basis.

Prices have already been raised thrice this year in January, April and July. On January 18, Maruti had hiked prices of some models up to Rs 34,000. Again it increased prices by 1.6 per cent (ex showroom) in April across all models. In July, it had hiked the prices of the hatchback Swift and the CNG variants of other models by up to Rs 15,000.

The price rise will come just before the start of the festive season which kicks off with Ganesh Chaturthi on September 10. Rivals Tata Motors, Honda Cars, Mahindra & Mahindra, Renault, and Toyota had raised prices in the July-August period.

Input prices

The hikes have been exercised to offset the increase in raw material costs such as steel and precious metals.

Commodity prices are expected to remain at multi-year highs in the first half of this fiscal before softening in the second half of the year, according to an Icra report.

Maruti sells a range of models from entry-level hatchback Alto to S-CROSS, priced between Rs 2.99 lakh and Rs 12.39 lakh (ex showroom Delhi), respectively.

With inputs from Calcutta Bureau