Golden run in debut year propels company sales growth
‘Dost’, the 2.5T light commercial vehicle from Ashok Leyland, has just completed one full year of successful operations clocking a sales volume of 34,917 numbers garnered from the 12 States it is presently sold in. Riding on this success, the company has bagged healthy export orders for the Dost from the SAARC markets.
Said Dr. V. Sumantran, Vice Chairman, Ashok Leyland: “We set out to create a vehicle to meet the requirements of an evolving LCV customer in India and we are deeply appreciative of the overwhelming customer response to it. The vehicle model has truly re-defined the benchmark among small LCVs with its class-leading performance, superior reliability and low cost of ownership. We still have a long road in front of us, but this surely is a journey that has started off well for us.”
A true measure of its success is the fact that the Ashok Leyland Dost has already emerged the market leader with a market share of 19 per cent (all India) in its 2-3.5T category. With the help of an entirely new dealership network equipped with modern infrastructure that is already 100 strong, the company plans to progressively offer the Dost pan-India as well as feed the overseas markets. At the same time, plans are afoot to enhance its LCV portfolio with the introduction of variants both in the goods and passenger segments.
Dost which has a payload capacity of 1.25T is available in three versions with the top-end version featuring air-conditioning, power steering and a palette of four colours to choose from: White, Beige, Blue and Aqua Green. Ashok Leyland also offers ready-to-use vehicles (RUVs) on the Dost platform for various applications such as refrigerated containers, steel containers, ambulances, aluminium fixed side decks and service-at-site vehicles.
Ashok Leyland has seen huge success with its Dost and one of the main reasons for the strong sales of the product is the professional and aggressive approach of its LCV dealerships. Dost dealerships have seen extremely good customer response with the product being positioned in such a way that it can cater to last mile applications and is also suitable for city-use. Even before its launch, there was a lot of hype about the product, with many customers having waited for over a year to buy the vehicle.
Dost being the company’s first-ever LCV, Ashok Leyland’s brand equity has certainly played a big part in the product’s success, however experienced customers are satisfied only by a really good product and that is exactly what the Dost has delivered in its first year of operations, a power-packed all-round performance.
Ashok Leyland closed FY13 at 70,917 vehicles in the domestic M&HCV market with a market share of 26.5 per cent translating into a gain of three per cent in a falling market. With exports at 8,778 vehicles, the 34,917 units of Dost sold during the year, pushed the company’s overall sales to 114,612 vehicles which is an all-time high.