Cars remain as core competence, though currently hit by hot-selling SUV

Gasgoo.com (Shanghai July 17) - Chinese sedans dropped near 6% in the first time of the year from a year earlier, with sales in June dropping for a third consecutive month on a year-on-year basis, while SUV increased 45.94% in sales from a year earlier.

More than 60% of all the newly launched vehicles in the first half of the year came out to be SUV, with the main competing focus changed to SUV from compact cars.

In the first half of the year, cars sales declined 5.89% on a year-on-year basis, with subcompact cars sales sliding more than 30% from a year earlier.

In fact, cars have already gone through the fast growing period in 2013 and 2014 which is currently happening in SUV. Therefore, though SUV seems having surpassed cars as the core competence, it just follows the old development road where cars lead.

At the beginning of 2013, mainstream joint-ventures launched a movement in grabbing the compact car market. And the distribution of each automaker in the compact car market has been settled with joint-ventures accounting for the most part. For example, Shanghai VW reported 58% of its overall sales volume being compact cars in the first half of 2015; and SAIC GM’s compact car (except Cadillac) sales accounted for 54.6% of the joint-venture’s overall sales volume in the first half of the year; and more than 80 percent of FAW VW’s overall sales in the first half of the year were compact cars.