Honda China car sales drop for five months in a row

Shanghai (Gasgoo)- Honda Motor's China sales declined 6% in June over the previous year to 107,985 units, according to the sales data released by Honda China.

For the first six months, the company saw its cumulative sales dropping 6.4% year on year in the world's largest auto market to 609,100 units.

GAC Honda delivered 61,301 vehicles in June, achieving a year-on-year growth of 9.8%. However, the other joint venture Dongfeng Honda June sales plunged 20.9% from the year-ago period to 46,684 units.

The Tokyo-based carmaker said on July 3 that its China sales have faced year-on-year decrease for 5 consecutive months. Honda's sales took a hit in China after the quality issues of its CR-V SUV model exposed earlier this year. Although Dongfeng Honda solved the issue by filing a plan in May to recall troubled cars, it has not made Honda sales pick up in China by the end of June.

It's noteworthy that the CR-V year-on-year sales drop in June was much slower than the year-on-year plunge of 77.4% occurred in May. Apart from the Civic, most models under Dongfeng Honda saw their sales shrinking in June to different degrees, which largely resulted in Honda's overall sales downturn in China.

Thanks to the robust sales performances of the Accord, Fit, Crider and Vezel, GAC Honda achieved a positive year-on-year growth last month, versus the sales drop of 11.4% in May. Besides, the Acura brand sales slumped 25.9% in June, which has little effect on the automaker's total sales due to its rather small total quantity.