The country's largest carmaker Maruti Suzuki India reported a 47.82 percent decline in consolidated net profit at Rs 1,041.8 crore in the third quarter ended December 2021, on account of lower sales due to the ongoing semiconductor shortage and increase in commodity prices.

The management addressed the shareholders in an earnings conference call. Here are the key takeaways from that:

The lower sales are mainly being attributed to the semi-conductor shortage with the management saying that its hit on sales volumes was 90,000 units in the third quarter.

Though things are slowly starting to pick up, the management has highlighted that production will not hit a full capacity of 0.55 million per quarter in the March quarter as well.

The current order book stands at 264,000 units and the management has expressed confidence in sustaining strong demand recovery.

The COVID-19 third wave did translate to a marginal dip in customer bookings to 6,000 per day in January.

The third quarter margins saw a 250 bps improvement compared to Q2. Gross margins saw a 50 bps improvement. The rest of the improvement in margins was due to operating leverage benefit from high sales volumes.

Also Read | Should you buy, sell or hold Maruti Suzuki shares after Q3 results?

Maruti Suzuki shares rose as much as 7.6 percent to Rs 8,661.6 apiece on BSE after the earnings announcement.

Market expert Prakash Diwan said Maruti Suzuki's quarterly numbers are definitely a big big relief. "It is a great recovery process that seems to have begun... The raw material input side has been fairly benign for the second half of the quarter in terms of some of the costs on the metal and commodities side coming down," he said.

(Edited by : Abhishek Jha)