Ford expects China car sales grow less than 10%

Ford Motor Co., the second-biggest U.S. automaker, said China's vehicle sales may rise by less than 10 percent next year as an economic slump curbs car demand.

China's auto sales may rise 6 percent to 10 percent this year and will grow by less than 10 percent in 2009, said Jeffrey Shen, president of Ford's China venture.

"I see it as a short-term adjustment,'' Shen said in an interview in Shanghai yesterday. The market will see ``marginal'' growth in the second half of next year, he said.

A financial crisis started in the U.S. has led to plunges in global stock markets, including a 66 percent drop in China's benchmark CSI 300 stock index this year. Car sales in Asia's largest auto market fell in September after dropping for the first time in three years in August.

"The economy may need some kind of miracle to turn around next year," said Yale Zhang, director at CSM Asia. "Auto consumption won't recover until the economy recovers."

CSM forecast 8 percent growth for China's vehicle sales this year and a 5 percent to 9 percent rise in 2009, Zhang said.

Ford's China sales rose 7.1 percent from a year earlier to 240,879 vehicles in the first nine months of the year. That's slower than the 30 percent pace in the year-ago period. The carmaker will introduce a new version of the Fiesta model in China next year to spur sales.

China's vehicle sales rose 12 percent in the first nine months of the year to 7.23 million, according to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers.

Volkswagen AG, the biggest overseas carmaker in China, posted a 4.2 percent decline in third-quarter sales in the country, according to numbers derived by Bloomberg News from a nine-month tally announced by the company.