KARACHI: As many as 5,000 prospective buyers have booked Honda Civic’s tenth generation model by depositing Rs1 million each for the vehicle, translating into five billion rupees for the company so far from bookings alone.

“Out of the total bookings, 80 per cent new Civic orders are from buyers in Punjab and northern areas,” CEO Honda Quaideen and Honda Drive In off Rashid Minhas Road, Shabbir Alibhai said while talking to Dawn.

This year, Atlas Honda changed its booking pattern and has asked customers to book Civic with a down payment of 50pc of the tentative price announced.

He said as per company’s policy, request of change of name and refund is not permitted to lure genuine end users.

The company, he said, plans to launch new Civic after Eid-ul-Fitr and the delivery of car to the customers will commence by end of July.

An analyst at Top Line Securities said pre-booking of Honda Civic started last week with an initial non-refundable deposit of Rs1 million. Honda Atlas Car (HCAR) will launch two variants of the new Civic – 1.8L Oriel Prosmatec with a price tag of Rs2.53m and 1.5L Turbo with a price of Rs2.90m (subject to government taxes).

Both variants will have a host of features and will only be available in automatic transmission with sun-roof for now.

The report of Top Line Securities said it is possible that HCAR may introduce lower price variants including manual transmission and hard top in due course. It should be noted that previous Honda Civic models gave buyers the latter options.

Based on the above positive response and price of Honda Civic, which is higher than expected, the analyst at Top Line estimated FY17 (year-end March) EPS to now clock in at Rs31 compared to previous EPS estimate of Rs26, upside of Rs5/sh.

During FY16 (Mar year end), HCAR produced a total of 25,700 cars, out of which 5,857 were Honda Civics while 19,843 were Honda City. Capacity of HCAR is around 50,000 cars annually. For FY17, he assumed that 11,000 Honda Civic and 21,500 Honda City cars will be produced, taking total production to 32,500 cars for the current financial year, the analyst said.

Published in Dawn, June 19th, 2016