AutoBeta(AutoBeta.net)08/05 Report--

According to relevant media reports, Moody's, an authoritative rating agency, has slashed its forecasts for global vehicle sales this year and next. At the end of March, Moody's had already lowered its sales forecast once.

Moody's cut its forecast for global car sales again as the risk intensified. Compared with its forecast at the end of March, Moody's expects global car sales to fall by 10.2 million and 91.1 million in 2019, 4.3 million fewer than its forecast at the end of March. Global car sales are expected to be 90.2 million in 2020, 5.9 million fewer than the previous forecast.

China, the world's largest single car market, is likely to see a sharp decline in sales in 2019, Moody's said. The Chinese market did show further contraction in the first half of the year and is expected to level off in the second half of the year. Moody's predicts that the Chinese market will see a 6.5 per cent year-on-year decline in 2019.

According to the sales data released by the China Automobile Association, from January to June 2019, the cumulative sales of the Chinese automobile market reached 12.323 million vehicles, down 12.4% from the same period last year. The agency also lowered its forecast for full-year car sales in China to 26.68 million vehicles from 28 million at the beginning of the year. Chen Shihua, assistant secretary general of the China Automobile Association, said that throughout the first half of the year, automobile production and sales were running at a low level, which was lower than the agency expected at the beginning of the year. The momentum of market consumption has not been increased by factors such as price promotion, and the wait-and-see mood of consumers has not improved.

Moody's also said that in addition to the Chinese car market, due to reduced incentives, fierce competition in the used car market and the deterioration of the financing environment, Moody's believes that the auto market in the United States, Western Europe and other regions will also be in a downward trend. Among them, the western European car market is expected to decline by 2% in 2019 and 3% in 2020.

In the first half of this year, US light vehicle sales fell 2.4 per cent year-on-year to 8.418 million, marking the third year-on-year decline in first-half sales in the US car market in nearly a decade.

European car sales fell 3.1 per cent in the first half from a year earlier, with 8.184 million new cars registered. With the exception of new car sales in Germany, which rose slightly by 0.5 per cent, other major markets have declined to varying degrees.

It can be seen that the downside risk of the global economy has increased, and the automobile industry has been directly affected. Throughout the world's six largest auto markets, with the exception of Japanese car sales remain stable, Europe, the United States, India, Russia and China and other markets are facing a "cold winter". Among them, Europe, the United States and Russia still maintained a decline of less than 5%, while the car markets in China and India fell by double digits. Another downgrade of the forecast also reflects the depressed state of the global auto market.

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