The country’s largest two-wheeler manufacturer Hero MotoCorp on Wednesday said that it has got “all the ingredients” to grow its market in all the key five premium or power brands – Xtreme, Xpulse, Mavrick, Karizma and Harley-Davidson X440 – with new product line-up starting from the upcoming Bharat Mobility Global Expo.

For the overall two-wheeler market, the company said demand has come back from the rural markets, leading the growth for everyone. For instance, for Hero MotoCorp, the rural markets contribute 53 per cent of the overall sales now, as compared with 40 per cent two years ago, Niranjan Gupta, Chief Executive Officer, Hero MotoCorp, told reporters here.

“We are addressing premium from a complete 360-degree perspective. Obviously, as we convert these brands into power brands, we’ll start seeing the results into the market-share flow as well,” Gupta said in a select media roundtable.

He said compared with other competitors, the company entered the premium brand in the last two years only with Harley-Davidson, Mavrick, and the re-entry of Karizma. The company has also launched new stores called Premia for these products and its electric vehicle (EV) brand ‘Vida’ and has crossed 60 such stores over the last one year.

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According to the Federation of Automobile Dealers’ Associations (FADA), Hero MotoCorp’s market share declined to 29.02 per cent in calendar year (CY) 2024 from 31.33 per cent in CY23, though in terms of retail sales the number of sales grew at 54,87,778 units in CY24 (53,49,423 units).

“We will soon cross 100 Premia stores before June-end, and then the journey will be again to increase that number as well. We are upgrading our current stores too (normal showrooms), we call it Hero 2.0 and we’ve upgraded 700 stores at a speed of more than one store per day in the last couple of years. And, then embedding within this is the entire phygital journey, where we have done a lot in terms of digital and artificial intelligence (AI), the customer journey,” Gupta said.

Rural markets

Talking about rural markets, Gupta said it bounced back during the festival season and the company hoped the trend to continue. He added that the rural markets are not yet fully back, but there are “green shoots”.

“The Covid wave impacted rural areas the most and that impacted.. — the medical cost going up, the confidence level going down so you conserve the spending — and the unemployment which led to the rural curb on the consumption; now you see things coming back… The crop has been decent, monsoon has been decent and the MSP of the crops have been going up. So that’s why I would say that all the ingredients of rural consumption have moved in the right direction,” Gupta explained.

On EVs, he said cost leadership will be key to the long-term winning, and the company was on its way to addressing the cost structure on EV as well.

“Anybody who closes into 20 or 25 per cent market share will get to number one and number two. It’s not going to be the same game as 50 or 60 per cent market share game. Given that there are five or six credible players, even in the long term,” Gupta added.