According to the National Association of Automobile Manufacturers of South Africa, new car and commercial vehicle sales for February showed modest gains compared the same month last year; with aggregate sales up by 3 159 units or 6,4 per cent – matching the slow growth expected this year.
The 52 359 new vehicle sold includes Mercedes-Benz South Africa’s total number of passenger cars, commercial vehicles and exports for February, marking it the third month that Mercedes Benz hasn’t been able to provide a detailed breakdown of its local sales figures as required by its parent company in Germany. Despite this there’s some good news in that Chinese manufacturer GWM has recently started to participate in the local sales report, albeit on a similar level to MBSA for the time being.
Because you won’t be able to find the GWM figures in attached PDF, we’ll mention here that the company sold 860 models in January this year, and moved 677 in February.
The total detailed reported Industry sales are 49 556 vehicles (remember, this excludes MBSA), 82,2 per cent of which (40 761) represented dealer sales, while 7,6 per cent represented sales to the vehicle rental Industry, 5,8 per cent sales to Government and 4,4 per cent to Industry corporate fleets.
Aggregate Industry new car sales during February 2012 stand at 36 357 units (including MBSA), and reflected an improvement of 2 303 units or 6,8 per cent compared to the 34 054 new cars sold during February 2011. The new car market had received support from car rental Industry, demand which accounted for about 10,5 percent of total new car sales.
With the absence of Mercedes-Benz’s detailed figures, Naamsa has decided that it is too difficult to provide an accurate analysis of the year-on-year market performance –so its focus has moved to the commercial sales figures instead. As such, industry total commercial vehicle sales during February, 2012 totalled 15 999 units, showed an improvement of 856 units or 5,7 percent compared to the 15 143 units of the corresponding month last year.
Exports of South African produced motor vehicles, including MBSA export sales data, during February, 2012 at 22 630 vehicles is a decline of 2 525 units or 10,0 per cent compared to the 25 155 vehicles during February last year. Industry export sales were expected to improve from April, 2012 onwards as the Ford global compact vehicle export programme and BMW’s new 3 Series export volumes were ramped up. However, the Industry’s export performance during 2012 would remain a function of the direction of the global economy. Vehicle exports into Europe were likely to soften as a result of the recession and debt crisis in the Eurozone. This could be offset by higher export volumes to African countries. At this stage, it was anticipated that for the year as a whole vehicle exports could grow by about 10 per cent to just over 300 000 units.
You can read the detaild sales report by clicking the DOCUMENTS tab and downloading the PDF.
