Mercedes Benz opened his first showroom in Lucknow

  Making Lucknow firmly on the map as a market with appetite for luxury products, iconic car brand Mercedes Benz opened its first showroom in the city on Friday. This would be the first such dealership by a luxury car maker in Lucknow as well as Uttar Pradesh, which bears testament to the economic growth and sustained prosperity that has come to the region over the last few years.

Director, Sales and Marketing, Mercedes Benz India, Debashis Mitra said "growth is now from tier-II cities. So called smaller towns have seen rapid growth over the last few decades and their consumption pattern is also changing now with prosperity being sustained over a longer period of time".

He said that they saw a huge aspirational demand for luxury cars in the Lucknow region when they toured the area as part of the "Pure Fascination" campaign in 2010 and also gauged that the buying power for luxury cars was present in Lucknow.

"We already derive substantial sales volume from Lucknow and adjoining cities and thought that taking a dealership to Lucknow would help us expand our network and reach out to customers much nearer to their homes" said Mitra. Besides Lucknow the dealership, Smart Hoops, and its state of the art service centre would cater to Kanpur, Varanasi, Gorakhpur, Mirzapur, Agra etc.

Managing Director, SRM Smart Hoops Ltd, Neeraj Agarwal said that the dealership will display full range of Mercedes Benz cars which start from Rs 32 lakh going up to a few crores for a car. He said that they hope to sell about 50 cars by the end of this fiscal and hope to double the number in the next year.

Debashis Mitra said that Mercedes Benz is present in 31 cities in India and as part of the network expansion plan to open 5 new dealerships in the coming months.

"Till three years back Delhi and Mumbai used to command 70 per cent of our sales. But now they only have a 50 per cent share which shows that sales volume is now increasingly coming from non metro cities. There are more than 1.5 lakh dollar millionaires in India and most of them now come from cities like Lucknow which we want to reach out to" said Mitra.

Mercedes Benz sold 7,400 odd cars last year in India and with its fast network expansion hopes to increase market share from newer towns and growth cities. With other luxury car brands also lining up to open their dealerships stores in Lucknow