The Taigun, the first product under Volkswagen 2.0 is now two years old. How do you feel?
Completing two years for a product that gave us the opportunity to redefine the brand in India is a big one for us. It has been doing well but of course, it definitely needs to do better. We have been focussing on getting more features and variants into the Taigun lineup to reach new customers, new price points and also stay relevant in the market. Over this year, we first came up with the GT Edge collection where we introduced the black paint job and manual transmission and also the matte edition. Now we have added new features like the twin front electric seats, upgraded infotainment package and footwell illumination. It’s all about how fresh and relevant you can keep it.
You are completing three years at the helm of Volkswagen India too, how has the journey been?
It’s always exciting when you get to reinvent a brand and launch new products. The past year has been about keeping momentum and making sure we focus on the operational part of the business because the initial buzz dies away very soon in the Indian market. We have to stay grounded, make sure we look at what is coming up, how customers are responding to not only our products but also to our communication and messaging and make sure we stay relevant in customers’ minds. That’s been the effort this year, trying to meet customer expectations. It’s been a good journey, but I think the key is to stay hungry, there should always be something which keeps you awake in the night, to look forward to the next day. So yes, I am as hungry as when I started.
This year we’ve seen you introduce a fair number of additions and updates to the Taigun and Virtus both. Please tell us about those.
The GT Edge collection was born out of the realisation that the market has moved towards the premium end and that customers looking for a Volkswagen are looking for something exclusive. That’s why we introduced the manual on the GT and the topspec GT plus variants. We also introduced options like grey and matte and still have a couple of other aces up our sleeve, which we will reveal soon. As I said, keeping the products current and introducing new features is how we have been tackling product upgrades this year.
The past couple of years we have also seen you go with a digital-first strategy. How is that shaping up?
Digital became the buzzword during COVID-19. Everybody jumped on the bandwagon and felt digital is here to stay. There are several parts to the digital journey though. One is the communication journey where digital is here to stay, and we see more and more marketing investments moving towards the digital phase. But you have to strike the right balance, other mediums of communication are as relevant as they were earlier. The other part is digital customers to customer’s digital journey. From prospecting to onboarding to buying a car. Here we undertook a lot of initiatives to offer an end-to-end customer digital journey. The past one and a half year, it has plateaued out as anticipated though. Now that the market is open, customers still want to touch and feel a car before buying it. But the success we achieved was good insight and we launched the GT Edge collection. We made it an exclusive collection, available online only. It received a stupendous response and in a short span of time, we have got 1,500 bookings. The GT Edge collection is sold out till January. It shows us a template of how to go for the digital journey for customers: make it exclusive, make it something they cannot get anywhere else.
EVs are the buzz and are getting mainstream. What are your thoughts and what can we expect?
This has been known for the last two or three years and development is on expected lines. We have been speaking about this subject for two or three years, and exactly what we predicted is coming true. Two years back electrics were less than 0.5 percent of the total market share. The last data I saw, it is already reaching three percent. So it is in the right direction and we see mass electrification in India happening towards the second half of the decade, maybe 2026 onwards. Of course, it is in discussions and planning stages, but electrification is the way ahead for the brand globally, and of course in India as well.
2023 turned out to be very good, we have seen record numbers. Your thoughts about 2024?
When we started out in January, we were looking at around 3.6 million units. By all the trends we see, the industry is likely to touch four million. So the growth is naturally more than what the industry or market expected. 2024 should continue that trend, there will be a natural plateauing happening, maybe we will not see the kind of growth that’s been happening over the past couple of years, but this year again, growth has touched 10 percent. So I do expect that the market will grow by another six to seven percent next year, which is good news for the industry.
