It’s an interesting time for motorcycle and scooter sales in India at the end of 2022. On one hand, November sales are down across multiple OEMs, when compared with October 2022 sales. On the other hand, those same November sales figures show growth as compared to year-on-year sales from each company. Also, in Royal Enfield’s case, the overall story of 2022 is still one of sales growth as compared to 2021.
Hero MotoCorp still leads the segment, reporting sales of 379,839 units in November, 2022. Numbers are relative, however—and even though a lot of OEMs would love to have sales figures like that, Hero also sold 442,825 bikes just one month earlier. So, from that OEM’s point of view, those November sales represent a 16.6 percent decrease, month-over-month.
Honda Motorcycle and Scooter India sold 373,221 bikes in November, 2022—which includes 353,540 units sold domestically, as well as 19,681 exports. It’s the only OEM to come anywhere close to Hero’s numbers—but again, it represents a month-on-month decrease as compared to HMSI’s October, 2022 sales figure of 425,000 bikes. Looking back year-on-year, though, Honda’s November, 2022 sales rose 38 percent over the 256,174 bikes it sold over the same period in 2021.
Of the top six two-wheeler OEMs in India in November, 2022, there’s a clear trend for five of them. Hero, Honda, TVS, Royal Enfield, and Suzuki all saw November, 2022 sales that were down as compared to their previous month’s numbers in October, but simultaneously up over their November, 2021 sales figures.
Bajaj was an outlier, with overall sales still good enough to place it in the top six OEMs overall, but showing the most serious sales slide out of the six. The company registered sales of 123,490 bikes in November, 2022, which is a 40 percent decrease over its October sales of 206,000. It’s also a 15 percent decrease as compared to its November, 2021 sales of 144,953 bikes.
In November, 2022, Royal Enfield overtook Suzuki and sold the fifth-highest number of bikes in India that month. Total sales were 70,766 bikes in November, 2022, which is down 14 percent from the 76,528 sold in October. However, it’s a 37 percent increase over the 51,654 bikes sold in November, 2021.
It’s worth noting that the majority of Enfield’s sales currently come from bikes with displacements of 350cc and below, with larger-displacement bike sales dropping by 42 percent year-on-year in November, 2022 when compared with November, 2021. Will the expected January, 2023 rollout of the Super Meteor 650 and the hotly-anticipated Himalayan 450 serve to reinvigorate that segment? We’ll just have to wait and see.
