SAIC Motor gains YoY sales growth after 15-straight-month downturn

Shanghai (Gasgoo)- SAIC Motor announced its annual sales in 2019 shrank 11.54% from a year ago to 6,237,950 units. However, after suffering 15-straight-month year-on-year downturn, the Chinese biggest automaker finally posted growth in December.

Among the five subsidiaries whose full-year sales all exceeded 100,000 units, only SAIC Maxus sold more vehicles than that of 2018. Notably, the champion SAIC Volkswagen featured a decrease of 3.07%, 3.65 percentage points fewer than the drop in Jan.-Nov. sales. Clearly, the contracted decline should be attributed to the 37.67% surge in its Dec. sales. 

Both the runner-up and the second runner-up—SAIC-GM-Wuling and SAIC-GM—confronted double-digit decrease in YTD sales. The latter saw its Dec. sales tumbled 27.61%, and failed to obtain year-over-year increase during the entire second half of 2019.

The monthly sales volume of SAIC Motor PV was quite a bright spot. Despite the dismal climate of overall PV market, the group's self-owned PV unit has been continuously scoring sales rise between July and December.

Last year, SAIC Motor sold roughly 350,000 complete vehicles in overseas markets, a significant growth of 26.5% compared with 2018. Of that, the sales of MG-branded cars zoomed up 90% to 139,000 units.

Moreover, the NEV annual sales hit a record high of over 180,000 units (+30%), of which more than 14,000 units were sold outside China.

（Photo source: Roewe)

The Shanghai-based auto group is striving to fit itself in the disruptive technical trends of electrification, ICV and sharing mobility service. SAIC Motor enumerated quite a few examples via its WeChat account to explain such efforts. For instance, SAIC Volkswagen, a joint venture with Volkswagen Group, launched on November 8 a BEV-focused manufacturing plant in Anting, Shanghai, which is particularly built for the production of MEB (Modular Electric Drive Matrix)-based BEVs. In April, the group officially launched the Roewe MARVEL X Pro, the world's first mass-produced model available for level 3 intelligent driving features.

(Photo source: Xiangdao Chuxing)

SAIC Motor also announced proudly its mobility service platform “Xiangdao Chuxing” has so far operated in six cities with over 7 million users registered.

Furthermore, SAIC Motor in early December inked a framework agreement with another state-owned automaker GAC Group for a widespread strategic cooperation involving technical R&D, resource synergy, investment, market expansion, business model innovation and global business operation, etc.