Again, China’s vaunted export machine received a black eye: China imported more cars in 2010 than it exported. Of the 18.27 million cars China produced in2010, a pittance of 2.98 percent left the country according to statistics released by China Association of Automobile Manufacturers (CAAM) via China Autoweb. Read More >
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Category: Sales
Another indicator that the Chinese car market is not about to collapse, as projected (hoped?) by some: Daimler is guiding towards robust sales in January. “I hope that we will see double digit gains again in January,” Mercedes sales Chief Joachim Schmidt told Reuters. With the month nearly over, executives won’t “hope” what they don’t already know. And what does that have to do with China? Read More >
Now that most of the large car companies have supplied their numbers, TTAC has compiled its annual table of the world’s largest automakers. In doing so, we have attempted to come as close as possible to the methodology used in the official OICA list, which will be published some time this summer. Here is the 2009 version as a reference. And here are TTAC’s Top Ten of 2010: Read More >
The oft predicted collapse of the Chinese market does not seem to happen. GM is the canary in the Chinese coalmine, and January, the month before the Lunar New Year festivities, is a key selling month. So goes GM, so goes China, so goes January, so goes the year. This time, January was especially critical: Many had predicted that the cancellation of tax incentives for sub 1.6 liter cars, that went in effect on January 1, would have serious pull-forward repercussions. Not as far as GM is concerned. Read More >
Regular TTAC readers know that there’s more to a successful performance from an automaker than pure volume alone. Average transaction prices, market share, and incentives all play a role in translating production numbers into profits. Luckily, our pals at TrueCar have broken all that lovely data down, and they’ve sent over the numbers behind Ford’s recently-announced $8.3b profit, the Blue Oval’s best performance in over a decade. And, as you can imagine, a performance like that requires not only a hefty increase in volume (up nearly 20% on the year) but also improvements in market share (up 1.23%), and transaction price. Yes, incentives stayed stronger than they perhaps needed to be, but they now make up a lower percentage of the average transaction price. And that, ladies and gents, is how you make a $5.4b pre-tax operating profit in the US market alone [Q4 and historical data after the jump].
According to data published today by Ford, the company sold 5,313,000 units worldwide “to wholesale” (i.e. out of the door.), up 447,000 units or 9.19 percent. With Volvo eliminated, the growth was 771,000 units. Record sales in the U.S.A. and Asia were partially offset by lower sales in Europe. Ford is not strong enough in China to profit like its competitors that are strong in China. One of these competitors is Hyundai. Read More >
Emboldened Tata has announced new plans to export their Nano. To markets such as Thailand, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. And Tata will do that carefully. “We will go after these markets one after another,” Tata CEO Carl-Peter Forster told Bloomberg at an industry event in Bochum, Germany. Gone are bravado and hype. No more mentions to export the $3,000 car to Europe or god forbid the U.S.A. Read More >
Volvo has come to the kind of conclusion we haven’t heard from an automaker in some time: it’s selling too many models. With nine models currently on the market, the Chinese-owned Swedish automaker has opted to cut that number by “five or six” nameplates, and will rebuild its US lineup around its XC60 and XC90 crossovers, and S60 sedan. As a Volvo spokesman explains to Bloomberg
We have to focus on the key segments with significant volume potential.
The first model to go from the lineup will be the V50 station wagon, but from there it’s anyone’s guess. To help kick off the speculation, we present the graph above, charting the recent sales fortunes of the nameplates that Volvo is considering for death. Since the one model on the chart that has already been marked for death (the V50) has the lowest volume, it might be safe to guess that the next model up the volume ladder (C30) will be the next to die. From there, it’s a lot more complicated. Last year the S40 moved 5,623 units, the C70 sold 5,263 units, the XC70 sold 6,626 units and the S80 sold 7,724. In terms of sheer volume, there’s reason to kill every one of these nameplates… but strategically there’s just as much of an argument for investing in any one of them. Too bad there’s only marketing resources for “five or six” nameplates. So, which models would you kill?
Troubled BYD has even more problems: Dealers defect the Chinese car maker, because the alleged master of the electric vehicle has perfected one ancient tradecraft: The art of channel stuffing. A Beijing BYD store switched to another brand because BYD required them to carry a whopping six times the monthly selling rate on the lot. The poor dealer that moved 70 BYDs in a good month was sitting on a steadily restocked inventory of 400 units.
Even that generous inventory strategy did not help: Read More >
Hyundai Motor Co. today released impressive results. Net 2010 profit increased 77.8 percent to 5.3 trillion won ($4.7 billion) on global sales of 3,612,487 units. That’s a 16.3 percent sales gain from a year earlier. Whoa, says the attentive observer of sales data, didn’t they make some 4.6 million last year? Where is the increase? The 4.6 million were Hyundai and Kia together.
Many journos will trip over that today. Read More >
Toyota “Lessons” TV Spot from electrocinema on Vimeo.
Edmunds’ has looked over its in-house shopping patter data, and has some bad news for the number one automaker in the US:
In December, 17.9 percent of car shoppers considered Toyota vehicles — 2.3 percentage points below levels seen in December 2009, before the 2.3 million-vehicle recall for potentially sticky accelerator pedals. Overall, Edmunds finds that 2010 consideration for Toyota vehicles was down about 3.8 percentage points year over year…
Evolving cross-shopping patterns on Edmunds.com also demonstrate the diminished power of Toyota’s brand. Consumers interested in traditional competitors like Nissan and Honda considered Toyota vehicles less often in 2010. Meanwhile, Suzuki shoppers – who qualify for higher interest rates, accept longer loan terms and make lower down payments, suggesting a lower economic status — increased their Toyota shopping considerably in the last year.
In recent months, though, some specific Toyota models are elbowing back in on traditional competitors. The rate of Edmunds visitors cross-shopping the Nissan Altima with the Toyota Camry, for example, has approached levels seen before the reports of unintended acceleration captivated the media and its audience last year.
The car-shopping site’s takeaway: Toyota isn’t just struggling against negative perceptions brought on by last year’s unintended acceleration recall… it needs new products. Which means Toyota’s plan to unveil 11 new or refreshed models through 2012 is coming just in the nick of time. Still, if those products don’t actually wow consumers rather than simply skating by on Toyota’s faded reputation, Toyota’s greatest strength, the trust and loyalty it enjoys from consumers, could be slip away. And given how disappointing the refreshed Corolla seems (at first blush… testing is still needed) in comparison to its hot-and-fresh competitors from Ford, Hyundai and Chevy, there’s a real risk that this could happen. Scandals come and scandals go… but resting on laurels is what really kills in this business.
With worrying news breaking recently about Nissan’s slow rollout of its Leaf EV, Toshiharu Sakai, a senior VP at the Japanese automaker reassures the Nikkei that
We initially planned to produce 10,000 this fiscal year, and we can meet (this target) by the end of March.
Sakai insists that the Leaf’s production has not been interrupted, and that the Oppama plant would produce 3,000 units in February before ramping up to its capacity production of about 4,000 units by March. Leaf production at Nissan’s Smyrna, TN plant will begin late next year, and will produce as many as 150k units per year (and 200k battery packs per year), while Nissan’s Sunderland, UK plant will be producing another 50k Leafs and 60k battery packs annually starting in 2013. All told, Nissan will have about 250k units of Leaf production when the Sunderland plant reaches full volume, which puts it on track to a commanding lead in global EV production… now it just needs the market to start demanding that many cars. Meanwhile, a minor issue with the Leaf’s ownership experience has raised its head and deserves a little attention.
Production of Chevrolet’s Volt was supposed to be limited to 10k units this year, a target GM has already set its sights on surpassing. With 2012 volume projections now reaching 25k units, the next step in The General’s quest to prove that the Volt is a viable vehicle is a staggering goal: doubling its 2013 production target from 60k to 120k units of production. According to Bloomberg, GM has not officially announced the 120k volume goal and may not build that many Volts in 2013 at all, if energy prices and supplier challenges don’t allow it. And though supplier issues could well leave the goal out of reach, even if GM is able to ramp up production to fulfill its 120k unit goal by next year, there are no signs yet that the market will support those production levels. After all, GM is essentially banking on the kind of volume-to-price niche that BMW has taken years to cultivate with its 3 Series… which starts at prices slightly below the Volt’s $41k, and still moved fewer than 110k units last year.
Ignore the commas in the X-axis labeling, and you’ll see that this graph compares total sales volume for last year against each model’s year-of-introduction as we hunt for the missing links between product cadence and sales performance. Above, you can see that none of the major D-Segment competitors was introduced before 2007, and that newness alone is not linked to sales volume. In fact, in the D-Segment, volume seems to decrease with newness (although historical data indicates that this is a brand-loyalty issue rather than a consumer preference for older vehicles). Moreover, it appears that more recent introductions are merely narrowing the competitive gaps in the midsized sedan segment (although we’ll need new Accord and Camry replacements to tell if that trend is for real).
The compact segment, on the other hand, shows a far less surprising correlation between year-of-introduction and sales, as sales grow in a fairly consistent manner as you move across the x axis from older to newer nameplates. The major lesson from these graphs: Honda and Toyota continue to enjoy a “reverse perception gap” in which their aging models tend to most dramatically defy volume expectations relative to the age of the competition. But with more competition coming this year, as Chevy’s Cruze, Hyundai’s Elantra and Ford’s Focus come into the market, the consumer’s tendency to give Honda and Toyota “the benefit of the doubt” could well be tested. And once perceptions start shifting, there’s no telling where they might end up.
Toyota released year-end global sales numbers for 2010. Thanks to an uptick in December sales, they were slightly better than estimated in December. Toyota Motor Corporation global group sales rose 8 percent to 8.418 million units. This includes Daihatsu and Hino.
Toyota sold 7.528 million units under its own nameplate, up 8 percent. Daihatsu sold 783,000 units, up 4 percent, and truck maker Hino moved 107,000 units, up a strong 35 percent. Japanese group sales were 2.204 million units, up 10 percent. Overseas sales rose 6 percent to 5.962 million units. But are 8.418 million units enough to keep Toyota in the top spot?
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