China's auto sales dip for 14 straight months

Shanghai (Gasgoo)- Vehicle sales in China, the world's largest auto market, presented the 14th-month-in-a-row year-on-year decline as of August, 2019.

In August, China's auto sales reached 1.958 million units, rising 8% over the previous month, while still falling 6.9% over the previous year.

Both PV and CV businesses faced downturn in August sales.

The country's auto outputs in August edged down 0.5% from the prior-year, substantially less than the 11.9% decrease in July outputs. Of that, the August CV sales even climbed 0.9% to 298,000 units.

The growth in Jan.-Aug. auto sales still remained negative.

PV sales in August dropped 7.7% over the year-ago period, versus a 9.5% decrease in July's volume. The SUV sales slightly grew 1.5% from the previous year, which offset the noticeable downturn in sales volume of cars, MPVs and minibuses.

Compared to July, 2019, PV sales showed an increase of 7.9% thanks to the rising performance of cars, SUVs and MPVs. However, none of them achieved growth in year-to-date sales.

According to the association, the sales volume of China's indigenous PV brands totaled roughly 614,000 units, up by 10.3% from the previous month, while down by 10.2% compared with the same period in 2018. They accounted for 37.2% of total August PV sales, 0.8 percentage points more than that of July.

China's homegrown PV brands sold approximately 5.178 million vehicles through August, a year-on-year decrease of 19.5%.

New energy vehicle business was again hit by downturn after July. Last month, around 85,000 NEVs were sold in China, down by 15.8% over the year-ago period.

Affected by the decrease in July and August, the growth in China's year-to-date NEV sales volume was contracted to 32%.