AutoBeta(AutoBeta.net)03/17 Report--

Affected by the Spring Festival in February this year, the overall new car market has declined significantly. Sales in the domestic narrow-sense passenger car market were 1.177 million in February, up 371.9 per cent from a year earlier and down 45.5 per cent from a month earlier, according to the Federation of passengers. Affected by this, the market differentiation is more obvious, weak brands are still weak, we will take an inventory of the sales ranking of weak models in February.

Since the second half of last year, signs of a rebound in new energy vehicles continue to be strong, such as Tesla, Wuling Hongguang MINI and so on have become best-selling models, among the best. However, the share of the new energy market is still small, which is not counted. Secondly, due to the large number and complexity of domestic independent brands, except for the strong performance of head car companies, the rest of the performance is at the end of the market, so it is not within the scope of statistics.

According to the proportion of cars released by the China Automobile Association in February, French brands are still in the smallest proportion, but from a single model point of view, the bottom models are no longer concentrated in French models, but are more scattered in other marginal joint venture brands, such as SAIC Skoda, SAIC GM's Chevrolet and Buick.

Looking at the car market and the SUV market, SAIC Skoda has as many as four models on the list of the worst-selling models, all of which are the main sellers of the Skoda brand. Despite the saying "Dumas Kodak who understands the masses", in fact, Skoda has been underperforming Volkswagen brands in China and has been rapidly marginalized in the market in recent years.

In its highlight of 2018, Skoda sold more than 330000 vehicles a year, but Skoda sold only 173000 in 2020, down 38.7% from 282000 in 2019. For this reason, Skoda brand has been "named" many times as one of the brands with the highest inventory.

Although SAIC-Volkswagen has experienced an obvious decline in the past two years, according to Jia Mingdysi, general manager of SAIC-Volkswagen Automobile sales Co., Ltd., "Skoda has been a drag in SAIC-Volkswagen in recent years. How to make Skoda not drag its feet and become a powerful leg to help the whole enterprise move forward? this is the reason why Skoda is determined to change." This also means that how to change Skoda's status quo has become the next direction of Volkswagen.

At the same time, SAIC-Volkswagen brands also have POLO and Huieng on the list, of which POLO is mainly affected by the contraction of the current mini-car market, coupled with the new flying of competing models and the squeeze of LIFE, making POLO less competitive. The Huieng model has always been a niche model because of positioning problems.

In addition to SAIC Volkswagen, some of SAIC GM's Buick and Chevrolet models also performed poorly, with a number of models on the worst list. Among them, although the Chevrolet brand has continuously updated many of its models in recent years, it has also launched a lot of brand-new models. However, it is more likely to maintain market share in the "misplaced competition" through substantial terminal discounts, stabilizing with popular models such as Malibu, Kruze, Kowoz and boundary explorers, while upward and downward models have lost their competitiveness.

After all, Chevrolet has always been a low positioning in the Chinese market. With the rise of independent brands, the joint venture brand market has been divided, and Chevrolet has become one of the marginalized brands. According to the data, sales in 2020 were 257004, down 38.13% from the same period last year.

By contrast, the Buick brand is better than Chevrolet, which allows it to accelerate the high-end of its models in an environment of gradual pursuit of quality in the domestic market, maintaining market share with models such as GL8, Onkway, Regal and LaCrosse. In addition, in the A-class market, relying on Yinglang in the terminal continuous decline and the return of four-cylinder models to maintain the forefront of the market. But in addition to these models, other models are not very competitive, far less than German and Japanese brands.

Although there are some French brands on the list, there are not as many models on the list as in the past, because sales of most models dropped significantly in February this year. After all, there are generally more than 100 French brands on the list, such as Peugeot 508,408,2008 and 5008 Citroen C6/C4 models. It reflects that the differentiation of some joint venture brands is more obvious.

In addition, the brand models on the list also include Dongfeng Infiniti, a high-end brand, and the decline in model sales is also an aging product, which has not been replaced for many years so that it can not be accepted by consumers. Other models such as the Mazda cX-8 and the JEEP Liberty have always been very niche models.

With the release of the model list, there will naturally be "hard-to-sell" models with best-selling models. After all, in the current stock era, the concentration of brands and models is becoming more and more obvious, and brands without word-of-mouth and product power will naturally be eliminated. Therefore, for joint venture brands, in the face of strong joint venture brands, they should know how to lower their profile and strive to compete with independent brands through their own advantages. It may be able to save some market sales.

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