In the blink of an eye, 2022, will China's car market have a new atmosphere in the new year? Because of the Spring Festival holiday, the sales data of the Federation in January will not be released until the middle of February, this issue we focus on the performance of the SUV sector, what will be special?
SUV outperforms the market, the stronger the stronger
First, look at the overall situation, in January 2022, domestic narrow passenger car retail sales of 2.079 million units, down 5% year-on-year, down 1.3% month-on-month, while the total sales of SUVs were 976,000 units, down 3% year-on-year and 1.7% month-on-month. From this point of view, the SUV sector is slightly outperforming the market.
In addition, although overall sales have declined year-on-year in January, from the SUV sales list TOP 15, most models show a clear rebound trend, their average year-on-year growth rate is nearly 80%, even excluding the most volatile Tesla Model Y (which was just launched in January last year) has more than 20%. This shows that there may be fewer people buying cars (the Lunar New Year is just stuck on February 1st, and the production and retail ends will generally take an early holiday to cause production and sales to lose), but the Matthew effect of the car market is becoming more and more obvious, the already hot cars are getting hotter and hotter, and the living space of the cars that are not performing well in the market is getting smaller and smaller. Of course, the gradual easing of chip supply has helped some models to release production capacity again.
The BBA is back in the fight
In january's sales chart TOP 15, I saw a few long-lost figures, and the BBA was back! And the rankings are not low: mercedes-benz GLC ranks 5th, BMW X3 ranks 7th, Audi Q5L ranks 11th, GLC and X3 sales both increased by more than 9,000 units from the previous month, and Q5L also increased by 6,000 vehicles.
Mercedes-Benz GLC, BMW X3 and Audi Q5L are the undisputed luxury mid-size SUV three small strong, they were once regular customers of this list, but because of the well-known chip shortage, BBA became the most affected brand, once there was a sharp decline in production capacity, no car to sell, the price of the car soared, the official even launched the "fare to buy back used cars" activity, they also disappeared from the TOP 15 list for a long time.
There is only one reason why the BBA is strong again: the capacity problem has been basically solved. Although we have not delved into the current chip market environment, we can indirectly speculate about the supply situation. I don't know if you have found that at the end of last year, "chip shortage" is no longer a hot word, we have rarely seen the news that the car factory has stopped production because of the lack of chips, search for keywords such as "chip", "production suspension", etc., most of them are still the news before September and October last year, and the current impact is mainly on foreign factories, and the impact on us is that the delivery time of some imported models is relatively long.
Secondly, through a simple understanding of the market, a number of BBA models have once again appeared relatively large car purchase discounts, and the car pick-up cycle has also been greatly shortened, so it can be inferred that their production capacity has basically returned to normal, and the known car sales have not created a panic psychology of "no car to sell" in the circle of friends, but as usual fancy promotion.
BBA is still that BBA, the user's brand loyalty is very high, as long as the production capacity returns to normal, sales will immediately go up, have to admire ah.
What happened to the Japanese SUV?
Looking at this sales ranking, independent brands still occupy the largest share, and 6 of the 15 cars are self-brand models. According to the past custom, the best performers among the joint venture brands are the Japanese series, for example, there are as many as 7 Japanese cars in the December list.
But in January, the situation changed a lot: only three Japanese cars remained in the TOP 15, Qashqai, Binji and CR-V, and the XR-V, RAV4, Veranda and Haoying, which continued to be popular, disappeared from the list, of which XR-V and RAV4 sold more than 20,000 last month, and Wilanda also had more than 18,000 vehicles, which means that they lost at least 4,000 sales. Among the "survivors", Binzhi and CR-V also have a more obvious decline - after all, december is the corner of 20,000, but the qashqai quietly rose by almost a quarter.
Obviously, the performance in December was still very good, how did the two fields disappear collectively in January? Is it that the production capacity cannot keep up?
I try to look at other segments, such as the sedan market, where the Toyota and Honda's flagship models, the Camry and Accord, sold nearly 25,000 and 23,000 units respectively in January, which is a very normal sales performance. But if you think about it, the situation here may be similar to that of an SUV.
Toyota and Honda, as well as Corolla, Leiling, Civic and several other cars that have been performing very well and steadily, can maintain the top ten or even the top five positions most of the time, and all disappear in January. Looking back at the data of the past few months, sales of these models have been erratic, high and low, and even if they are high, they have never been as high as the same period last year , that is, the normal level before the chip shortage problem.
After all, Toyota and Honda were both car companies that lacked cores at that time, so I had to boldly speculate that their production capacity was still not fully restored, so whether it was SUV or sedan sales have fluctuated relatively largely, and can only coordinate production capacity to fully guarantee the production capacity of some main models.
The editor said: The biggest change in the domestic SUV market in January is that as mentioned earlier, the BBA collectively killed back to the forefront of sales and Toyota Honda collectively "disappeared", and the others are almost the same as before: although the Haval H6 did not return to the courage of 40,000 or 50,000 vehicles in the same year, it can still hold the top of the sales, the CS75/CS55 brothers continue to be strong and the monthly sales reach about 30,000 vehicles, and the Model Y is still the dragon that sees the beginning and does not see the end... Of course, we can still see some new faces, like Auchan X5 and Hongqi HS5. Overall, the fluctuation of monthly sales of many models is relatively large, indicating that there are still large uncertainties in the current car market, the first thing is when manufacturers can recover 100% from the bottleneck of production capacity, and whether the economic environment under the epidemic will affect consumers' car purchase decisions.