Bajaj Auto is confident of going back to 20% margins by

 Q4-end Bajaj Auto reported 4.7 percent fall in profit in the third quarter to Rs 924.6 crore as against Rs 970.6 crore in the same period last year. Revenue for the quarter decline 4.1 percent to Rs 59,500 per unit. S Ravikumar (more) President, Bajaj Auto |   Bajaj Auto   reported a 4.7 percent fall in net profit in the third quarter to Rs 924.6 crore as against Rs 970.6 crore in the same period last year. Revenue for the quarter decline 4.1 percent to Rs 59,500 per unit. Speaking to  S Ravikumar, President – Business Development at Bajaj Auto said that the demonetisation impact is visible in shrinkage of numbers in last quarter. The company is now focusing on its products for growth. 

Product mix has helped improve realisations by 160-170 basis points year-on-year. Ravikumar is confident that the company will go back to its 20 percent plus margin growth by end of this fiscal. Below is the verbatim transcript of S Ravikumar's interview to Sonia Shenoy & Sumaira Abidi on  Sumaira: Can you take us through where the big bump up for you has actually come through? A: One, we were operating in external environment in November and December on the back of demonetisation impact. The numbers, for example, in the first half year when the domestic motorcycle industry grew by 13 percent, we grew by 18 percent. In October both industry and Bajaj grew by 7 percent. In November and December when the industry fell by minus 16 percent, Bajaj had a 10 percent fall. So taken together October, November and December the industry fell by 7 percent and we fell by 3 percent. So relatively we were doing much better on the back of good product portfolio but still the demonetisation impact has been there and it was very much there in November and December. Therefore, the shrinkage in numbers and relatively the three-wheelers domestically were very much affected because of demonetisation. However, what we concentrated on was we couldn\\'t do internally.

 We focused on the right products, V12 has come out, Dominar has come out and BS4 is behind us in terms of ramp up and technical. So, all has done very well. The forex realisations have been good at almost 67.7 as an average for Q3. On the back of all that we have returned solid EBITDA of 22 percent. So that\\'s the strength of Bajaj Auto. We focus on what we can do strongly; cost control, EBITDA and of course market share improvement. The market share in the wholesale has improved to 18.5 but in November and December the retail market share has been upwards of 20 percent. Sonia: I want to check on realisations because those have improved sequentially to almost Rs 59,500 per unit. What lead to that improvement? Is it only because there are more amount of premium motorcycles selling and do you think that there could be a continued improvement in realisations over the next couple of quarters as the Dominar starts to sell some more? A: Of course. If I look at Q3 of last year versus Q3 of this year, there has been improvement of almost about 160-170 bps in realisations - that has augur well for the company, the mix is certainly a story there and the export realisation has been good and going forward the Pulsar range and the Dominar and Avenger, all are going to add. So it's a healthy mix as far as average revenue per unit (ARPU) is concerned

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