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Since the sales of the Lexus brand in China continued to rise in 2019, it has also helped the brand to reverse the trend in the global market, with sales reaching an all-time high. But in such a performance, Toyota executives recently revealed that the Lexus brand will also face difficulties.

According to foreign media reports, the Lexus brand has recently made a more detailed product layout of its models, including a number of Lexus models to be replaced, as well as entry-level crossovers based on Toyota's YARiS CROSS.

In fact, the current product layout of the Lexus brand has covered a number of market segments, both in terms of cars and SUV, to the entry type, the middle-end type and the high-end type, so it also seems to be a very compact layout, which also helps the Lexus brand get a significant improvement in sales in recent years.

But this performance does not look optimistic to Toyota North American CEO Ted Ogawa, who revealed in an interview a few days ago that he is not worried about the lineup of the Lexus brand, but it is a bit slow for the product layout.

From the current Lexus product layout, it is also true that in terms of cars, in addition to ES and LS models with a short replacement cycle, other models such as CT and IS have not been replaced for a long time, among which IS models are nearly 7 years old. The same is true for SUV models, the best-selling NX and RX models are significantly slower than many of their competitors.

As a result, Lexus attributed the decline in sales in the United States to the lack of product replacement. The data show that sales in the United States, the largest single market in Lexus, have declined for four consecutive years, with a total of 298000 vehicles sold in 2019. Although it is only 0.1% lower than in 2018, its share of the luxury car market in the United States has dropped from the highest 18.2% to 13%. It is also the lowest sales figure since 2013.

In the view of Tetsuo Ogawa, there is more than one reason for the weakening of competitiveness. in the current highly competitive US luxury brand market, many brands rely on radical discount strategies. in particular, Cadillac, Volvo and other brands, which are in the second-tier luxury brands, are not as competitive as Lexus, even though they sell less than Lexus. As a German BBA luxury brand in product upgrading is relatively faster than competitive models, coupled with its certain brand effect, there is still a lot of impact on Lexus.

Although there are obvious signs of decline in the performance of the Lexus brand in North America, it benefited from the growth of 8% each in China (up 25%), Europe (up 14%), Japan (up 13%) and the Middle East and East Asia last year, all of which helped it hit a new high in 2019. Under the performance of the domestic market in the first quarter of this year, Lexus still won the brand with the highest import sales by virtue of its highest sales, with a year-on-year decline of only 12.7%.

Product plans for Lexus 2021 and 2022 have also been exposed a few days ago. According to the product plan it exposed, almost all Lexus models will be revamped and replaced, including IS, ES in car market segments, UX, NX, RX and LX in LS,SUV market.

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