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| Thanks to the good performance of the Chinese markets, Volkswagen has became the world's third largest multinational auto giants. |
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Countries with big auto industry and multinational automakers have recently announced their first-half results one after another. Chinese market has become a growth hotspot for multinational auto giants.
Global car demand decreased by 18% in H1
Automobile production and sales in the United States, Japan, France, Britain, Canada and Russia all slumped, except for a few countries such as China, Germany and Brazil.
With the financial crisis sweeping the world, global auto sales have been struggling with vehicle sales declining by large margin since the second half of 2008. In the first six months of 2009, global market demand for the automative products shrank by almost 18%.
The global financial crisis hit the US auto industry hard. Two of its three auto giants collapsed and restructured. In the first half of 2009, US was overtaken by China as world’s largest car market as the former's auto sales were 1.8 million units, down 35.1% compared to the same period last year.
Meanwhile, world No.3 car market Japan sold 2.18 million motor vehicles, down 21.5% from a year earlier. Sales in Britain, France, Canada and Spain in the first half were also in a double-digit slump. Russia, one of the world's emerging auto markets, said the 49% year-on-year fall brought total sales to 760,000 units due to the economic downturn in major export markets.
Thanks to government-backed incentives to encourage people to upgrade their vehicles, new car registrations in Germany jumped by 20.9% to 2.18 million units. This means that Germany was the only developed country to saw a year-on-year growth of sales for the first half of the year.
In 2009, driven by Chinese government's restructuring and stimulus plans for the automobile industry, sales of China's domestically manufactured vehicles stood at 6.09 million units in the first half of this year, up 17.69% over the figure a year earlier, among which passenger vehicle sales volume rose 25.62% year on year to 4.53 million units, and made up 74.3%. Joint ventures of multinational automakers accounted for 70% of the 4.53 million passenger car sales.
Although almost all countries have introduced various policy measures to help the auto industry, global auto market didn't show signs of rebound until in the second quarter of the year as the market regained stability instead of drop.
China: multinational auto giants a hotspot for auto sales
Toyota, GM, Ford, Volkswagen, Honda, Nissan, Hyundai and PSA all saw minus growth in global sales from January to June 2009. However, China has become one of the few growth hotspots for the auto companies.
With the good performance of the Chinese and German markets, the sales of Volkswagen in the first half reached 3.1 million cars, declining 5% year-on-year. Volkswagen increased its share of the world passenger-car market to 12% in the first half, compared with 9.9% the year before, making it the world's third largest multinational auto giants following Toyota and GM.
General Motors posted a 21.8% global sales drop from a year earlier for the first six months of 2009 amid the economic slowdown and the automaker's slide into bankruptcy. But its China vehicles sales rose 38% year-on-year as China's stimulus policies boosted car demand.
The global sales of Ford declined in the first half, while its sales in China surged 14%. Sales of Chrysler's imported vehicles also saw a year-on-year growth in China.
PSA Peugeot Citroen suffered great losses in its global performance in the first half, but its China sales represented an 18% jump from a year earlier.
During the first half of the year, Honda and Nissan enjoyed double-digit growth in China, despite weak sales in the US and Japan.
Unlike the outstanding performance of other multinational auto giants in China, in the first half of 2009 Toyota's performance in China was flat. Toyota sold 284,000 units in China in the first six months of 2009, about as many as in 2008. However, it's not bad considering that its group's global vehicle sales for the January to June period fell 26% from the previous year For the first half of this year as auto demand fell heavily in its key markets. Toyota's group sales fell 37.9%, 26.4% and 22.3% in the US, Europe and Japan respectively.
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