Summary: Growth of imports in Chinese automobile market

Gasgoo.com (Shanghai) - Automobile and auto part imports have played an important part in the Chinese market over the past few years. According to statistics collected from the General Administration of Customs and sorted out by Gasgoo.com (Chinese), a large disparity between automobile and auto part imports, which were both valued under $16 billion in 2009, has started appearing in the past two years, with the former vastly outgrowing the latter. From 2009 to 2010, the value of automobile imports had nearly doubled to $30.58 billion, while value of auto part imports grew 45.3 percent to $18.64 billion in the same time period.

Automobile imports increased a further 42.6 percent from 2010 to 2011, with a total yearly value of $38.74 billion by the end of November. The value of auto part imports, meanwhile, grew 20.3 percent, finishing at $20.29 billion.

In actual numbers, China imported 419,000 vehicles in 2009, 2.8 percent higher than in the previous year. That number increased to 810,000 in 2010 and 929,000 last year, with growth rates of 93.4 percent and 28.3 percent, respectively. By comparison, the overall automobile market growth rates were 32.4 percent in 2010 and 2.6 percent last year.

With the exception of last April, automobile imports every month in 2011 were higher than in the previous year. Since the drop in April, due in no small part to the March 11 earthquake in Japan, automobile imports have been growing steadily.