Acura is about to exit the Chinese market?

In the face of strong competitors, weak brands have almost no room to live.

Another "niche" car brand has been abandoned by the rapidly developing Chinese auto market.

Recently, it was reported that Honda's high-end brand Acura plans to withdraw from the Chinese market. Acura is said to have stopped importing cars and cars from the Chinese market from 2021. Some dealers said that acura models have been discontinued in China, and 4S stores are still selling inventory cars produced last year. In response to the above acura rumors, the relevant person in charge of Guangqi Honda responded to China News Weekly: "I don't know, there is no official statement at present. ”

At present, GAC Acura, the only independent 4S store in Beijing, gac acura Beijing Jingang store is being renovated, and it is understood that this store may become a Honda electric vehicle dealership in the future. In the future, Acura's sales and after-sales maintenance will be transferred to guangqi Honda 4S store.

Although there is no official news, Acura's withdrawal from the Chinese market is not empty. In recent years, China's auto market as a whole has been under pressure, but the domestic luxury car market has maintained growth every year, and unfortunately, Acura in the second-tier luxury brands has never been able to share the market dividend.

RDX (Image source: GAC Acura)

Sales data show that GAC Acura's cumulative sales in China in 2021 are only 6554 vehicles, down 45.05% year-on-year. Among them, CDX sales were 3264 units, and RDX sales were 3290 units. In the U.S. market, Acura handed over a report card of 157,000 units sold annually in the year, an increase of 14.9% year-on-year, ranking among the top 5 in the U.S. luxury car market. Compared with the smooth road in the North American market, Acura is quite "unsatisfied" in the Chinese market.

Acura dilemma

After 16 years of entering the Chinese market, Acura has been catching up, but it has never been able to find its own position in the Chinese market.

The Acura brand was founded in the United States in 1986. In 2006, Acura officially entered China with two models, the RL, a medium-sized sedan of 680,000 yuan and a medium-sized sedan TL of 430,000 yuan. At that time, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Audi had achieved domestic production, and the luxury car market was basically dominated by BBA-based first-line luxury brands.

Due to the lack of sufficient publicity and brand image establishment, potential consumers have not formed enough cognition of Acura, and there is a feeling of "luxury brand is not luxurious" in the brand image. This made the high-priced Acura models high and low.

Ten years after entering the Chinese market, Acura finally began to try to localize. In 2016, Acura was officially domestically produced and was highly expected by Guangqi Honda. According to the plan at that time, by 2020, the sales of the Acura brand will account for 10% of the overall sales of Guangqi Honda, that is, annual sales of 100,000 vehicles.

In the luxury car market, such a goal is not very ambitious. In 2016, the annual sales of first-line luxury brands have jumped to 500,000 or so, such as Audi for 591554, BMW for 516355, Mercedes-Benz for 472844. Also in this year, Lexus, Jaguar Land Rover and Cadillac also achieved the goal of annual sales of 100,000. This is key for the luxury car market – second-tier luxury brands selling more than 100,000 units a year are considered to have a place in the market.

But for Acura, there is a huge gap between ideals and reality. According to the data, in 2017, Acura sold 16,348 vehicles, an increase of 80.4% year-on-year; in 2018, Acura sold 10,044 vehicles, down 38.56% year-on-year; in 2019, Acura sold 14,786 vehicles, an increase of 47.21% year-on-year.

In 2020, Acura's main sedan TLX-L was discontinued because it did not launch a model that met the "National VI" standard, and its import car business was basically in a state of suspension, relying only on the two domestic SUV models CDX and RDX. This year, Acura sales inevitably fell, only 11210 vehicles.

By 2021, the gap in the luxury car market will widen further. The BMW Group's sales in the Chinese market have risen to 850,000 units (including the MINI brand), and mercedes-Benz and Audi sales have also maintained more than 700,000 units for many years. Lexus, a second-tier luxury brand that also belongs to the Japanese camp, has achieved sales of 220,000 units without domestic production. Acura's annual sales in China are only more than 6,000 vehicles, which is even less than the monthly sales of some popular models of Guangqi Honda, about one percent of the sales of a single BBA brand.

Electrification transformation

Nowadays, China's auto market bid farewell to the stage of rapid growth and began to transform from an incremental market to a stock market, while new energy vehicles began to erode the market share of fuel vehicles after they continued to mature.

In this process, the "Matthew effect" of the strong and the weaker the traditional car camp is constantly amplified. At the end of the era of lying money, a large number of marginalized car brands such as DS, Changan Suzuki, Dongfeng Renault, etc. began to fade out of the Chinese market. At the same time, another part of the car brand that is constantly losing market share is trying to find a way out through change. For example, Dongfeng Peugeot and Dongfeng Citroen under Dongfeng Peugeot Automobile will be taken over by the French side and the Chinese side respectively; Dongfeng will sell all the shares of Dongfeng Yueda Kia, and Kia and Yueda will reorganize the joint venture company.

In the process of the industry's big waves, the era of fuel vehicles has not won the praise of the Chinese market, or it will make way for electrification.

According to Honda's China electrification development strategy, 10 pure electric models using the "Honda" brand will be launched in the Chinese market in the next five years, and all new models launched in China after 2030 will be electrified models. The first electric car under the new pure electric brand e:N will be launched in the spring of 2022. In the future, the "e:N" series products will be exported to overseas markets.

In China, Acura may fully give way to Honda's new e:N pure electric family. Sources said that in the future, the dealer authorization of Honda's new pure electric brand e:N models will give priority to the original Acura dealers.

Today, Acura has released enough information about electrification in the United States, its largest single market. After the launch of the new generation of Integra in the United States, Acura has fully entered the development of electric models, and is expected to launch its first electric vehicle based on GM's Ultium platform and Ultium battery in 2024.

Emile Korkor, Acura's vice president of sales for North America, previously said: "For Acura, we are electrifying much faster than the Honda brand. At the same time, he also mentioned that Acura will completely bypass the hybrid and quickly switch to electric vehicles. By 2030, more than half of Acura's sales will come from electric vehicles.

According to the data, global new energy passenger car sales increased by 108% to 6.5 million units in 2021. In the mainland, the production and sales of new energy vehicles reached 3.545 million units and 3.521 million units last year, respectively, an increase of 1.6 times year-on-year, and the market share reached 13.4%. In the face of the changing trend of the market, almost all automotive companies have begun the transformation of electrification.

Although the final direction of Acura in the domestic market is still inconclusive, adjustment is imperative.

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