Following the recent policy, the local assemblers have suspended booking of cars.
Earlier this year, it was proposed in the budget 2018-19 that the non-filers would be barred from booking, registering or purchasing a locally produced car and imported vehicles from 1, July 2018, until they file the tax return. After the approval of budget 2018-19 by National Assembly of Pakistan; the action has been taken by every local automaker.
Pak Suzuki, IMC Toyota, Honda and Al-Haj FAW have suspended the booking of vehicles, as per the new policy. We have contacted all the official dealerships of the companies as mentioned earlier, and they explicitly said that as per the new policy the booking of the vehicles to be suspended.
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Pak Suzuki has issued a directive, which reads as follow:
“Any application for booking, registration, or purchase of a new locally manufactured motor vehicle or for first registration of an imported vehicle shall not be accepted or processed by any vehicle registering authority of Excise and Taxation Department or a manufacturer of a motor vehicle respectively unless the person is filler”
Consequently, we are constrained to stop booking of all Suzuki vehicles for all non-filers customers including all individual and all corporate customers with immediate effect, the directive further mentions.
One of the official dealers of the company revealed to us that people whose delivery time is after July will be contacted by the company to ask them to change their status from non-filer to filer if they want the vehicle.
We have also contacted to new car importers such as Porsche and Audi Pakistan. The official of Porsche told us that the new policy is for non-filers barring them from buying vehicles, on the contrary, their customers are all filers and they haven’t suspended the booking of cars. While one of the officials at Audi said they are currently discussing the matter and will update soon.
After the proposal, many considered this as a good step for the auto industry by the government, while some expressed their discontent on the issue. Senate Standing Committee on Finance after the proposal recommended to the government to relax restrictions on non-filers and allow them to buy or import cars up to 1000cc to give relief to the middle-class population of the country. However, the proposal was rejected by the government.
CEO IMC Mr. Ali Asghar Jamali, previously while speaking to a local media outlet also showed discontent on the proposal. He said that 60 percent of our buyers are non-filers and if they are barred from purchasing the car, the sales will drop sharply. This new condition or proposal doesn’t apply to used car buyers, he further added.
It is to be noted here that IMC a few days back issued a public notice encouraging its buyers to change their status from non-filer to filer to avoid delivery delays or cancellations of vehicle orders. The public notice reads as, “While announcing the budget for the fiscal year 2018-19, the government has recently introduced a new policy in order to restrict all non-filers from purchasing locally manufactured and/or imported vehicles. This includes all individuals whose names do not appear in the Active Taxpayer’s list as well as those customers who have already booked a vehicle and are expecting delivery after 30th June 2018.
We have also contacted a couple of motorcycle manufacturers and were informed that the bikes consumers will not have to follow the same rule, for now at least. However, we will update as soon we hear from their side.
Let’s see how consumers react to this recent development. Stay tuned for latest updates.
