audi: After doubling sales in 2021, Audi India eyes consecutive year of a double digit growth

The company is counting on full-year sales from two of its most popular models in India – the Q7 launched on Thursday and the recently-launched Q5 sport utility vehicle (SUV). Sales of both cars had been temporarily stopped in India.

“We need to get back our rightful share in the market,” Balbir Singh Dhillon, head of Audi India, told ET in an interview.

Audi sold about 3,300 cars in India last year, 100% more than a year ago. However, this was still significantly off its 2019 sales of 4,600 units and all-time high of 11,200 units in 2015.

While high input costs and a shortage of semiconductors remain a challenge for the company and the automobile industry at large, Dhillon said that the company’s headquarters “have been kind to us” when it came to allocation of cars.

Meanwhile, the sharp rise in prices of vehicles over the past couple of years has been followed by a similar increase in wealth creation and inflation, and the market had the appetite to absorb these price hikes, Dhillon said.

On the electric vehicles (EV) front, Dhillon said that there was encouraging consumer response to its products and that it was sold out till March. He did not disclose any sales numbers.

Audi will become a fully electric car company from 2030 and will have to start making EVs in India locally, Dhillon said. However, the company has not yet achieved a “threshold volume” to consider local production of EVs yet, he said.

Luxury-car market leader in India Mercedes Benz said that it will begin local assembly of EVs in India beginning this year.

The Volkswagen Group company has been one of the vocal supporters of Tesla’s demand for reduced import duties on EVs in India. The duties were left unchanged in the new union budget.

“We’ve been always talking about lower duties on electric cars. But we don’t see that happening so sometimes we have to accept some facts and move on in life,” Dhillon said.