AutoBeta(AutoBeta.net)02/09 Report--

A few days ago, the China Automobile Circulation Association released a report on imported car sales counted by Guoji Automobile. The report shows that due to the impact of the year-end performance, China's imported car sales increased by 24.1% in December compared with the same period last year, with a cumulative sales volume of 102000 vehicles. However, for the whole year, under the influence of the declining automobile market and the macro economy, sales still fell slightly by 2.3%, narrowing the rate of decline, with cumulative import sales of 1.086 million vehicles.

From the perspective of imported passenger models, the imports of the three major imported models, sedans, SUV and MPV models, all declined to varying degrees in 2019, with the car market declining the most, with a year-on-year decline of 4.5 per cent above average, while SUV and MPV models showed a slight decline of 0.7 per cent and 0.5 per cent respectively. SUV and car models accounted for a large proportion of all imports, at 54.6 per cent and 41.6 per cent, respectively.

The domestic imported car channel consists of normal imported cars and parallel imported cars, of which the cumulative sales of normal imported cars for the whole year were 838000, down 1.8% from the same period last year, while the cumulative sales of parallel imported cars were only 163200, up 16.8% from the same period last year. Although sales of normal imported cars are much higher than those of parallel imported models, parallel imported sales have risen due to the impact of the latest vehicle emission policy in 2019.

From the perspective of imported car brand structure, the terminal sales of the first domestic group brand competition in 2019 is very fierce, followed by Lexus, BMW and Mercedes-Benz. Mercedes-Benz still ranked first in imported car sales in 2018, far ahead of Lexus and BMW, but in the first half of 2019, Mercedes-Benz was overtaken by Lexus and BMW, and put Lexus in the first place for the whole of 2019. Year-on-year growth reached 25.7%, while BMW brand sales increased slightly by 7%, while Mercedes-Benz fell by 23.4% year-on-year, ranking third.

The second group brand ranking is relatively stable, but the market performance has declined, such as Porsche, Audi, Mini and other brands showed a small decline. However, the China Automobile Circulation Association said that the effect of destocking in the industry in December 2019 was obvious, reaching a five-year low.

In terms of parallel imported cars, sales in 2019 were 163000, up 16.8 per cent from a year earlier, accounting for 15 per cent of total imports and 2.4 per cent year-on-year growth. Among them, Toyota accounted for 44.4%, followed by Nissan and Mercedes-Benz. In addition, Toyota and Mitsubishi increased their share of sales by 4 per cent and 6.2 per cent respectively, while other brands declined.

Although Tesla did not achieve domestic sales growth in 2019, the cumulative growth rate reached 226.6% compared with the same period last year. However, there is still a certain gap compared with Toyota, which has been ploughed deeply in the domestic imported car market for many years, and Toyota has once again become the biggest winner in China's imported car market by virtue of the absolute import quantity advantage of Lexus and its own SUV models in the imported car market.

Combined with the overall market performance of luxury brands in 2019, the domestic car market has gradually shifted to the stock market, and driven by the upgrading of national consumption, the segment market of luxury brands has gradually achieved growth. Compared with imported models, domestic luxury brands are favored by more consumers at more favorable prices, so that the luxury car market grew by 11.9% in 2019, with a relatively small increase in sales compared to imported models.

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