AutoBeta(AutoBeta.net)05/01 Report--

Toyota, Honda and Nissan, Japan's top three automakers, plan to speed up production at their factories in China, the Nippon Keizai Shimbun reported. Among them, Toyota and Honda plan to increase production by 10% in May compared with the same period last year. Nissan also plans to increase domestic factory production in May, but it is still down 20% from the same period last year.

Toyota has four complete vehicle factories in China, which are located in Guangzhou, Changchun, Tianjin and Chengdu. Since the outbreak of the domestic epidemic, these factories have stopped production and have resumed production in mid-February, but production capacity has dropped sharply. Toyota's sales in China fell 22.1 per cent to 270900 vehicles in the first quarter of this year, including 15.9 per cent to 101800 vehicles in March. At present, the domestic epidemic has eased, and growth is expected to resume in April, and the growth rate may exceed that of the same period last year.

Honda's sales in China last year rose 8.5 per cent to 1.554 million vehicles, an all-time high. Honda's production in China fell by 170000 in February and March as a result of the outbreak, especially at the Dongfeng Honda plant in Wuhan, which has been shut down for the past two months, which has had a huge impact on Honda's production. Thanks to the improvement in the current epidemic situation, Honda plans to increase its car production by 10% in May to make up for the production losses caused in the past quarter. Honda's sales in China fell 33.7 per cent to 222100 in the first quarter, including 50.8 per cent to 60400 in March.

It is understood that Nissan's sales in China returned to the level of the same period last year in April. Nissan suspended production at four Chinese plants from the end of January to mid-February. Nissan plans to increase production at its factories in china in may and return to 80% of its output in the same period last year by may. Nissan's sales in China fell 39.9 per cent to 206500 vehicles in the first quarter, including 44.9 per cent to 73000 vehicles in March.

For now, China is the first country in the world to recover from the epidemic. Toyota, Honda and Nissan all hope to increase production at their factories in China to make up for the loss of production in China in the past few months. while consolidating its position in the world's largest car market.

In the context of the gradual recovery of China's auto market, the epidemic situation in overseas markets is not optimistic. Global car sales by Japanese automakers fell 30 percent in March as the COVID-19 epidemic spread around the world, Reuters reported. At the same time, with the deepening of the epidemic crisis, sales will decline further in the coming months.

In March, seven Japanese carmakers sold 1.82 million vehicles worldwide, down 34 per cent from 2.77 million in the same period last year. Toyota sold 779151 vehicles worldwide in March, down 22.6 per cent from the same period last year; Nissan sold 315194 vehicles last month, down 43 per cent from a year earlier; and Mazda's March sales fell 33 per cent to 103400, the biggest drop at the end of the month since 2004.

Global sales by seven Japanese carmakers fell 7.3 per cent to 26.5 million vehicles in the 2019 fiscal year to March, the lowest in four years. Toyota sold 10.4566 million vehicles in fiscal year 2019, down 1.4% from a year earlier. Nissan's sales in fiscal 2019 fell 13.2% to 4.7916 million, the worst sales since 2011 and the first time it sold less than 5 million vehicles in seven years. Mazda sold 1.41 million vehicles in fiscal year 2019, down 9% from a year earlier, the first time in nearly five years that sales were less than 1.5 million.

Chris Richter, a senior analyst at CLSA in France, expects global sales of Japanese automakers to fall sharply in March, indicating that Japanese automakers' annual profits in fiscal 2019 were much lower than expected. In addition, affected by the epidemic, sales of Japanese automakers are still in a state of decline, and sales are expected to decline by about 35% in fiscal year 2020, resulting in operating losses for most Japanese automakers in fiscal year 2020.

Welcome to subscribe to the WeChat public account "Automotive Industry Focus" to get the first-hand insider information on the automotive industry and talk about things in the automotive circle. Welcome to break the news! WeChat ID autoWechat