All trouble for Fiat India with sales at 622 units in October 2011
Fiat India is making waves all over the news and that too for all the wrong reasons. First it was Fiat India’s website being hacked and now the sales reports for the month of October at just 622 units, despite Fiat’s aggressive promotions in India, take things to a whole new level.
The first blow to Fiat India in the previous month came when Fiat India’s website was compromised by Pakistan based hackers. The hackers had allegedly added a new page to the news section of the website (screenshot below) which seems to have been fixed as of now. But, Fiat India is yet to get rid of the HTML page (click here) which apparently is still accessing their DNS.
And with the sales reports for the month of October, 2011 just in at a mere 622 units, Fiat India have a lot of catching up to do if they want to see the figures go north. Sales for the month of October have dropped 25% compared to last month and a whopping 70% fall from last October. To get things clear, Fiat India has a decent lineup of cars in India with the Fiat Linea and Grande Punto very attractive buys at reasonable prices. Both these cars are built like tanks, handle like on rails, have frugal and reliable diesel engines and look like a million dollars.
The problem for Fiat India lies in the slowly dying TATA – Fiat joint dealerships. The recent announcement of the break up of the partnership between the two has prompted existing Tata-Fiat dealers to simply drop the Italian brand, a factor which is clearly affecting sales. Now unless Fiat India decides to do something drastic about this, things will get more worse for Fiat in India.
