Gasgoo.com (Shanghai August 6) - South Korean automakers, who had won part of Chinese market with best price-quality ratio, now sink like a stone on sales in the second quarter of the year. In particular, the sales decline rate of South Korean automakers in June approached nearly 30%. In the first half of the year, these automakers decreased around 6% in general.
According to the report of Beijing Hyundai, the join-venture sold 510,000 units in the first half of the year, a year-on-year increase of 7.7%, falling far behind half of its annual sales target of 1.16 million units. Dongfeng Yueda Kia Motor reported sales of less than 300,000 units, accomplishing 38.8% of the annual sales target.
South Korean automakers were troubled with sales slide in SUV market segment while the Chinese SUV market positively increased 40% in general. These automakers sold 181,776 units in the first half of the year, decreasing 4 percentage points on a year-on-year basis. And there exist no more South Korean SUV brand in the top 15 best-seller automakers list.
The objective factors included that the presence of competitive Chinese vehicle brand SUV. Since the beginning of last year, an array of Chinese brand SUVs entered the market segment, which included Haval H2, Haval H6, CS75, and Zhongtai T600. These hot-selling SUVs have edge in configuration and size compared with South Korean brand SUVs when their selling prices are close.
On the other hand, South Korean automakers didn’t perform well in marketing and sales and upgrading production line and launching new models. They have ignored building the high-end vehicles to raise their brand image as they pursued expand sales volume.
Beijing Hyundai, whose products used to gain popularity with cool appearance currently experienced sales slide, indicating that appearance is not the killing edge of vehicles. In addition, South Korean automakers have received much compliant in frequent maintenance, low hedge ratio.
Chinese vehicle industry has entered a phase of restructure, when market share of all the automakers will be reallocated. The sink of the South Korean automakers is just the beginning of the reallocation.
