the oems to provide a helping hand and compensate to survive through the crisismarket leaders have large cash reserves they can easily take the responsibility of dealers manpower as other automakers have supported their dealers by paying rental costs a maruti suzuki dealer shared on condition of anonymityit is to note that for the last 1015 years automotive industry has seen massive growth and everyone has benefitted from that oems and dealers alike industry experts suggest that sometimes dealer principals tend to divert their investments in real estate and similar other ventures which leads to reinvesting in the dealership business becoming one of major concerns for the industry thus on being unable to liquidate these investments made in other ventures they are pushed into a situation of insolvency during a crisis like todays times another issue that keeps them on the edge is the big inventory push from oemshowever this crisis which began with the prolonged slowdown in the auto sector coupled with bsiv inventory and the coronavirus crisis has truly left the entire industry in a situation like never before as per the dealers lobby body federation of automobile dealers association of india fada there are over 25000 dealer outlets in india that directly employ 25 million peopledealerships reopen with a dilemmawhile most dealerships of major markets lie in the containment zone some of those who are allowed to open are still in a dilemma even when we open we will do so in a smaller setup starting from the rural outletsdealerwe are not pushing too hard to reopen the outlets as the customer footfall is not expected which will lead to unnecessarily increasing our fixed costs even when we open we will do so in a smaller setup starting from the rural and semirural outlets where the covid impact has been comparatively lower said a hyundai dealer from the west as per the protocols of the local commissioner office we are allowed to open from 10 am to 2 pm which does not really justify getting back to the business told a maharashtra dealeranother small dealer from nagpur mentioned our dealership is rented and we have no plans to reopen the workshop until there is a little positive sentiment expected in the marketseven the ones who are on the greener side of the grass are doing so in a phased manner they point out that the main reason for coming back to their brick and mortar is mostly oriented towards completing the physical deliveries of the bookings made in the month of march while also sorting out the cash flow that was stuck with the banks vendors or customers due to the sudden lockdown on march 25other set of dealers is still stuck with the confusions of the authorities even when the state government has given the guidelines to open the local authorities and municipal corporations are implementing their own rule book of staying at homeas per the dealers who got their businesses running last week customer response