AutoBeta(AutoBeta.net)04/19 Report--

Since 2020, the overall domestic economy has suffered a sudden impact of the epidemic, which has brought a certain impact on various industries, whether in terms of consumption or production. Among them, the automobile industry, as one of the bulk consumer goods, undoubtedly has a great impact on the overall domestic economy.

According to the latest data released by the National Bureau of Statistics, retail sales of consumer goods in China totaled 2.645 trillion yuan in March, down 15.8 percent from the same period last year, or 4.7 percentage points lower than in January-February. Of this total, retail sales of consumer goods other than automobiles totaled 2.3841 trillion yuan, down 15.6 percent, while total retail sales of automotive consumer goods totaled 260.9 billion yuan, down 18.1 percent from the same period last year, a decline higher than the social average. This also reflects that after being affected by the epidemic, the impact of the overall economy on the automobile industry is also greater.

However, judging from the year-on-year growth in retail sales in March, the biggest impact is not the consumption of cars, second to retail sales of clothing, jewelry, home appliances and oil. This is also due to the fact that in addition to petroleum commodities, other categories of goods tend to be more consumer-oriented. At the same time, as the epidemic has a certain impact on the current people's travel, automobile consumption will also get greater demand.

Judging from the data from January to March, the total retail sales of automotive consumer goods totaled 632.6 billion yuan, down 30.3% from the same period last year. Compared with several categories of goods with a slightly larger decline, and compared with the March data, we can see that the demand for automotive goods has recovered more, but it is still higher than the 19% decline of the social average.

According to the "investigation report on users' car purchase intention after the epidemic" released by the China Automobile Circulation Association a few days ago, although the demand of the vast majority of consumers has been affected by the continuing epidemic, only 5% of consumers have cancelled car purchases due to the epidemic, while the vast majority of consumers are considering postponing their car purchase plans, accounting for 63%, while the remaining 31% of consumers are considering buying cars as soon as possible. However, whether they are new buyers or trade-in users, most of them are considering delaying the purchase of cars.

And this set of data also reflects that affected by the epidemic, most consumers are in a wait-and-see state, how to faster enhance consumer confidence, will also become an important signal to help the automobile industry to achieve a rebound. According to the "report," whether new or trade-in users, they expect the overall car purchase cost to be lower. According to more than 80% of users, if dealers gradually enlarge the offer, there may be a buying spree.

However, compared with the performance at the consumer level, the automobile industry has a relatively greater impact on production. According to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics, due to the COVID-19 epidemic, the added value of industries above scale in China fell 1.1 per cent in March; in the first quarter, the value-added of industries above scale fell 8.4 per cent from a year earlier.

In March, the added value of 16 of the 41 major industries maintained year-on-year growth, and the decline of the automobile manufacturing industry was much higher than that of other industries, whether it was a decline of 22.4% in March or 26% in the first quarter. are the industries with the largest decline. Among them, the specific automobile production totaled 1.461 million in March, down 43% from the same period last year, and from January to March, the cumulative production was 3.471 million, down 44.6% from the same period last year.

According to the explanation of the growth rate of industrial value added, it not only reflects the rate of industrial growth, but also reflects the degree of change of industrial production in a certain period of time. Through this index, we can judge the operation trend of the short-term industrial economy and the prosperity of the economy. But judging from the added value of the current automobile industry, it is obviously not optimistic.

In addition, the capacity utilization rate of the national automobile manufacturing industry (the ratio of actual output to production capacity) was only 56.9% in the first quarter of 2020, down 21.4% from the same period last year. This also shows that the automobile industry was relatively affected by the epidemic in the first quarter, and the recovery of production capacity has not yet achieved normality.

Therefore, in the short term under the control of the epidemic, dealers may realize the rapid sale of the first batch of inventory models and get back the funds through good preferential efforts, but in April-May, with the gradual increase in passenger flow, supply may fall short of demand. After all, according to the current output of the automobile industry, the overall capacity performance is still at a low level. At the same time, it will be difficult to achieve higher concessions from dealers.

However, as car production capacity gradually returns to normal, the consumption of some consumers is suppressed, which is also likely to bring the market back into a new period of growth.

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