Yamaha hopes to increase scooter sales by 50 per cent with Fascino

After launching the executive motorcycle Saluto to challenge its Japanese rival Honda Motorcycle & Scooter India's Shine, the maker of R1 super bike, Yamaha India is taking the fight to Honda's bread and butter Activa segment with the launch of retro looking Fascino at Rs 52,500, ex-showroom New Delhi. Having got off to a modest start in the scooter space with Alpha, Ray and Ray Z, Yamaha thinks Fascino has potential of pulling prospective Activa customers to Yamaha showrooms and help company grow its monthly scooter volumes by 50-100%, within a year. With its attractive styling, the company is aiming to target the youth with this 110 cc Scooter.

Roy Kurien, VP, sales & marketing at Yamaha Motor India Sales Pvt Ltd told ET, "With Fascino we think we will be able to come into the consideration set of scooter buyers, which so far was a challenge. Fascino is a unisex model and it will appeal to different set of buyers. We should be able to increase our monthly scooter volumes by 50% immediately." Yamaha India currently sells about 20,000 units of scooters per month, over the next three months, Kurien sees the volumes moving up to 30,000 units before touching 40,000 units per month by festive season. The Fascino is powered by an air-cooled, 4-stroke 113 cc "BLUE CORE" engine. Due to its lightweight body, scooter can deliver a fuel efficiency at 66 kmpl, claims the company.

In FY-15, Yamaha India posted a strong 22.59% growth in scooter volumes selling 216,960 units, albeit competition grew faster than Yamaha with the company's scooter market share falling marginally by 10 basis points to 4.81%. On the other hand Honda Motorcycle marched ahead with over 30% growth to 2.5 million units in FY-15. In a market which grew by 8%, Yamaha India grew at double the market rate to sell about 5.65 lakh units in FY-15, for the current calendar year to grow by 25-30% by selling 7.5 lakh units, before aiming to touch 1.2 million units by 2017. Kurien says the top down strategy is working very well for the company. "Its all about adding new customers now, therefore you see our products are priced very competitively and we are also expanding our network to reach out new customers. Once we reach a certain scale, then it will be easier for us to react more quickly and think big," added Kurien. Yamaha will be adding 200 more dealers till the end of the year to take to count to 600.