Two-wheeler retail registrations rose 19.69 per cent to 17.14 lakh. Four of the seven biggest makers grew and lost market share anyway.
“Two-Wheelers, Passenger Vehicles, Commercial Vehicles, Tractors and Three-Wheelers each set fresh August records,” said FADA president Sai Giridhar on Monday, “and overall registrations were the highest ever for the month.” All true. Two-wheeler retail registrations came to 17,14,610 units, up 19.69 per cent on last August. Records all round, then. Except the interesting column in that release is not the one anybody printed.
Allow me to explain.
Everyone grew, and not everyone gained
Honda finished on top, as it has for a while, and that is what got written up. Here is the thing. Honda’s market share went from 26.03% to 26.09 per cent. That is not a win over anybody, no? That is a company growing at exactly the speed the market grew, which in a month this size is the least you can do. Hero, Bajaj, Suzuki and Yamaha all registered more machines than last August and every one lost share doing it. Growing and shrinking at the same time. It happens far, far more often than the announcements let on. Which is the trouble with a ranking: it tells you who is biggest, never who is winning.
The share went to TVS, who took most of a percentage point, and to Royal Enfield, who grew 23.45 per cent. Sit with that one. In a month carried by commuter volume, by the scooter somebody’s brother-in-law buys when the old one dies, the thing gaining ground fastest near the top is the company selling heavy, slow, gloriously unnecessary motorcycles to people who simply wanted one. My RE 500 is fourteen this year and has never been fast for a single kilometre of it. I have never once minded. Evidently I am not alone.
The electric column is the one to watch
EV penetration hit 10.68 per cent, up from 7.66 per cent a year ago, the first crossing of ten in a month the festive season is not propping up. Good. But inside that number Ather grew by about half again, and Ola Electric fell 28.83 per cent – the only maker in the table to go backwards.
I have ridden both – a week on an Ather 450X, an afternoon in Bengaluru on a Simple One – and I came away from that afternoon certain I understood electric scooters. I did not. All I had learned was what they do in the first hour, and nobody learns month fourteen in an hour. The scooters are fine, some of them spookily good in traffic. Which means the thing separating them is not on the spec sheet at all.
Buyers worked that out before the industry did. Watch anyone shopping around one and a half lakh: they will tell you which one claims the most range, then what they have heard about its service network, then buy the other one. Nobody stands at a showroom door talking about kilowatt-hours. They talk about who picks up the phone.
To be fair to Ola, one bad month is not a verdict on a real company with real people in it. And to be fair to everyone, the same release has registrations down 5.70 per cent on July, which nobody printed either, mind you. A record against last year and a soft month against last month are both true at once. A trade body will only ever hand you one.
So what would move me? September. If the electric share holds above ten before the festive numbers land, the crossing was structural. If it slides back under, it was a good August and nothing more.
Records are easy. Share is earned.
