Bajaj Auto, the country’s second largest two wheeler manufacturer, is upgrading its 600 dealerships

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as it wants to create a distinct brand identity and service experience for its two power motorbike brands — Pulsar and Discover. The company hopes this will help it up its market share in the intensely competitive motorcycles market, which has attracted renewed interest from firms such as Mahindra and Honda Motor.

“We are already the number one in profits and see potential in being able to increase our domestic market share in motorbikes from 26 per cent to 32 per cent. The next financial year will be the year of new launches for us with a number of them including a 350 cc Duke from KTM and the highest powered Pulsar ever,” said Rajiv Bajaj, MD, Bajaj Auto.

The company, which dominates the sports bike segment in India with its Pulsar brand, recently decided to convert its 32 Probiking showrooms into KTM showrooms. Simultaneously, it wants to infuse its Bajaj bike dealerships with a new look and feel to ensure they stay contemporary with the image of the Pulsar.

“We are rolling out a new company identity across our dealerships, which will ensure that our two core brands Pulsar and Discover are displayed prominently yet separately keeping with the brand promise,” K Srinivas, president - motorcycle business at Bajaj Auto. The company is also trying to improve the after sales experience at the dealer workshops by improving service quality and sensitivity to customers. “We are going to implement Total Productive Maintenance at all of our dealerships to ensure that we look at both said and unsaid customer complaints. We have already started a pilot on this at 11 dealerships and will scale this nationally based on the experience herein,” added Srinivas.

The company hopes the spiffer dealerships will allow customers to be given a feel of the technology such as digital twin spark engine, which has been patented by the two wheeler major. On Monday, the company launched the all new Pulsar 200 NS, its fastest motorcycle ever, which it plans to position against the Honda 250 CBR250R and the Yamaha YZF-R15. Bajaj said the triple spark powered water cooled engine bike (its first ever to use this tech) will be launched in April and would be priced under Rs one lakh as compared to Rs 1.2 lakh upwards for the competition. Yaresh Kothari, research analyst at Angel Broking said, “The company is venturing into a high-end segment that they were not present in. We expect them to be very aggressive in the market dominated by very few players.”

“We hope the new Pulsar will dominate the mid sports segment making a sports bike affordable to a much larger mass, said Bajaj. The naked sports version (in which you can see the engine) of the bike will be followed by a faired version where the engine etc is covered by body parts.

The company that has around 800-900 people in its R&D set-up at Pune has applied for patents for its triple spark technology. “The new launch should be successful given the premium positioning. However, one should not rule out cannibalisation as it has a 220 cc bike,” said an auto analyst with a leading brokerage firm who declined to be identified.

“Pulsar is a brand and a strategy for us that has pricing power and produces the best business result making us the most profitable auto company in the world. It’s the best middle class sports bike in the world. Rather than a value for money family vehicle this is a high tech, sexy, high performance individual vehicles. If Pulsar goes wrong then the strategy at Bajaj Auto will come undone,” said Bajaj.

The Pulsar 200 NS will initially be sold in India for 6-12 months before the company exports it to key markets such as Philippines, Colombia etc.