Mahindra achieved highest ever monthly sale of tractors in October

This claim once again opens the discussion about whether companies should present wholesale sales figures or retail sales figures?

02 Nov, 2019

Yesterday, Mahindra tractor’s October sales figure created a lot of buzz in the industry. Numbers were good but not up to the level of what the company had achieved last year in October 2018.

In October the sale of Mahindra farm equipment sector (Mahindra tractor, Swaraj tractor & Trakstar) has been 44,646, a 4% drop in sales compared to the last fiscal year October sale of 46312.
Above sale figures are not the talking point, the talking point is falling year-on-year(YoY) sales of Mahindra still it has managed to achieve the highest ever monthly tractor sales. Confused?

Well let us clarify this, above mentioned sales volume, is of wholesale tractor sales. It is the number of tractors billed to the dealer by the company, but, Mahindra in its claim of the highest ever monthly sales is talking about retail sales which are the number of tractors sold to customers by the dealer.

Mahindra group managing director, Pawan K Goenka took to twitter to express his excitement about this achievement.
 

Congratulations to our Tractor sales team and dealer partners for achieving the highest ever  monthly deliveries last month. I hope this is a sign of things to come in the next few months. @MahindraRise
— Pawan K Goenka (@GoenkaPk) November 1, 2019

Replying to his tweet Mahindra group chairman Anand Mahindra’s views added weight on reporting retail sales volume.

The industry really needs to switch to reporting retail and not wholesale volumes. There are some strong signs of life in the market. And pipeline stocks have been slashed by controlling billings to dealers. Very appropriate stock levels now. https://t.co/Y6M1PcGcMT
— anand mahindra (@anandmahindra) November 1, 2019

This claim once again opens the discussion about whether companies should present wholesale sales figures or retail sales figures? Over the years companies have used dealers to stock the tractors so that they can claim big numbers of tractors sold. This process unnecessarily burdens the dealer which Results in their financial losses or even sometimes closing of their dealership.

Not just the dealer territory manager, area manager from companies too suffer from this pressure of billing, which leads to the communication gap between the dealer and the company, as most of the talks between dealer and company representative is about billing.

It's not that companies and dealers were not aware of the retail sales figures. It was all about creating a bubble around the numbers. Mahindra being the market leader with around 42% market share took an initiative to break this bubble. Let's see how other companies report their figures from now on. Let us hope other tractor brands also join this trend so that a better environment for everyone in the chain can be created.

What do you think about this article? You can write to us at tractorgyan@gmail.com.

 

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