Summary: Own brands lead the Chinese SUV market in January

Official automotive sales statistics for the month of January gathered by the China Passenger Car Association have been officially released, Gasgoo.com (Chinese) reported. According to the statistics, a total number of 168 SUV models were sold during the course of the month. A total of 884,528 SUVs were sold in January, representing year-on-year growth of 11.2%. That positive year-on-year growth rate is due in part to new policies halving vehicle purchase taxes.

Great Wall’s Haval H6 led the market with monthly sales of 45,993 units. Ranking in second and third were GAC’s Trumpchi GS4 and the Buick Envision, with sales of 34,870 units and 30,658 units, respectively. In fourth place was SAIC-GM-Wuling’s Baojun 560, whose sales fell a full 32.5% to the surprise of many in the industry. Meanwhile, Geely’s newly-released Boyue, which has been suffering from limited production, has clearly benefited from the opening of Geely’s new plant in Baoji, Shaanxi. 

On the whole, domestic own brand manufacturers performed exceptionally strongly, with eight of the top 10 best-selling models being Chinese brands. A total of 544,721 own brand SUVs were sold in the month, up 15.9% year-on-year and dominating the lion’s share, 61.6%, of the entire SUV market. In second and third place were Japanese and German SUVs, which combined achieved less than half the number of sales Chinese SUVs did.

Since its market launch last October, GAC’s seven-seater GS8 has been a phenomenal success, with its retail sales in January totaling 9,418 units. The GS8 is the first domestic SUV in the 150,000 RMB to 200,000 RMB range to achieve a solid sales performance. Built on the all-new B/C platform, which GAC independently developed based on technical knowledge gaining in its joint venture partnerships with Fiat and Toyota, the GS8 is a major achievement for GS8. Its technical strengths, combined with the recent phasing out of the one-child policy, make the seven-seater SUV especially popular among Chinese households.

With the opening of the country’s economy, the Chinese government promoted a policy of allowing multinational companies access to the untapped Chinese market in exchange for supplying local companies with technical knowledge. The result of this has been a number of near copycat vehicles whose chassis and other parts are closely based on foreign models. However, for local manufacturers to actually go beyond this and enhancing their own R&D capabilities to offer state-of-the-art vehicles of their own has proven to be a major challenge. In that respect, the respectable market success of the GS8 is an encouraging sign to other own brand manufacturers hoping to make their own quality SUV models to establish the best foreign brands have to offer.