The auto market struggled to survive in March: new energy vehicles bucked the trend and the penetration rate of independent brands reached 41%

Financial Associated Press (Beijing, reporter Xu Hao) news, the epidemic spread across the country in late March, making it difficult for the Chinese auto market to move forward.

According to the data of the Association on April 11, the retail sales of the domestic passenger car market in March were 1.579 million units, down 10.5% year-on-year and 25.6% month-on-month; the cumulative retail sales from January to March were 4.915 million units, down 4.5% year-on-year, a year-on-year decrease of 230,000 units, and the overall trend was lower than expected.

"Since the supply of chips has recovered compared with February, there is a good basis for the recovery of production and sales in March, and the automobile market should show a stable upward trend." However, the new crown epidemic in March spread across the country, and dealers in many places were affected by their stores and transactions. Cui Dongshu, secretary general of the Association, believes that the change in the epidemic sealing measures has a certain impact on logistics efficiency, and retail losses are large.

The new energy market of independent brands has increased significantly

Compared with the automotive industry, which is affected by various uncertainties, the new energy vehicle market has still achieved a counterattack. Wholesale sales of new energy passenger vehicles reached 455,000 units in March, up 122.4% year-on-year and 43.6% month-on-month, close to the previous year. From January to March, the wholesale number of new energy passenger vehicles was 1.190 million units, an increase of 145.4% year-on-year.

It is worth mentioning that the wholesale penetration rate of new energy vehicle manufacturers in March was 25.1%, an increase of 14 percentage points compared with the penetration rate of 11.1% in March 2021, while the penetration rate of independent brand new energy vehicles was as high as 41%.

According to the data of the Association of Automobile Associations, there are 13 companies with wholesale sales of manufacturers exceeding 10,000 vehicles, only Tesla is a foreign brand, and the rest are independent brands. Among them, BYD wholesale 104338 new energy models in March, 65,814 Tesla China, 51,157 SAIC-GM-Wuling, 21,817 Chery Automobile, 20,317 GAC Aian, 15,624 Changan Automobile, 15,414 Xiaopeng Motors, 15,057 Great Wall Motors, 14,166 Geely Automobiles, 12,026 Nezha Cars, 11,034 Ideal Cars, 10,880 SAIC Passenger Cars, and 10,059 zero-run cars that exceeded 10,000 for the first time.

"Autonomy has gained significant increments in the new energy market, the performance of head enterprises is differentiated, and traditional car brands such as Changan Automobile and BYD have shown high growth year-on-year." Cui Dongshu said.

Judging from the overall performance of Changan Automobile and BYD in the automotive market, the two car companies ranked second and third respectively in the ranking of narrow passenger car retail sales manufacturers in March, which is also the first time that the two car companies have obtained such a high ranking.

Relying on the growth of new energy vehicles, the sales volume of the head's own brand in March reached more than 100,000 units. Among them, Changan's sales of autonomous passenger cars reached 134,000 units, and the gap between BYD, Geely Automobile and Great Wall Motors is not large.

On April 7, data released by the Ministry of Public Security showed that as of the end of March, the number of new energy vehicles in the mainland reached 8.915 million, of which 7.245 million were pure electric vehicles, accounting for 81.27% of the total number of new energy vehicles. In the first quarter, 1.11 million new energy vehicles were newly registered, accounting for 16.91% of the total number of newly registered vehicles, an increase of 644,000 units compared with the same period last year, an increase of 138.20%, showing a high-speed growth trend.

"In the context of such a huge base and subsidy decline, new energy vehicles still maintained rapid growth in March, which indicates that the purchase of existing policies has driven a shift to consumer demand." Some industry insiders analyze it.

Production and sales in April are still facing uncertainty

Although the new energy vehicle market is still growing by leaps and bounds, overall, production and sales in April are still facing a state of uncertainty.

"According to the provincial production data of the National Bureau of Statistics, Shanghai and Jilin each account for about 11% of the country's automobile production, and the production of some enterprises in Shanghai is running at full capacity, so the production and sales of passenger cars in the core areas will be greatly affected in April." Cui Dongshu believes that "due to the long automotive industry chain, high coordination requirements, and a wider range of production and logistics bases, the production and marketing pressure in the automobile market in April may be very large." ”

Weilai Automobile, which has just announced the suspension of production, is a typical car company under the crisis of the epidemic. On April 9, WEILAI Automobile said on its official APP that since March, due to the epidemic, the company's supply chain partners in Jilin, Shanghai, Jiangsu and other places have stopped production one after another and have not yet recovered. Affected by this, vehicle production has been suspended. Weilai Automobile said that due to the above reasons, many users' vehicles will be delayed in the near future.

"Shanghai, Kunshan still have a large area of suspension of production and operation, the current Geely factory has not stopped, but production has been greatly affected." A Geely Automobile insider told reporters, "The development of the epidemic this week is more critical, if the supply chain can improve, production still has the opportunity to catch up." ”

In addition to Weilai, Geely and other OEMs, the domestic battery giant Ningde Era has also been affected by the upgrading of epidemic prevention and control. According to market news, there has been a few epidemics in Ningde recently, the local government has temporarily upgraded the epidemic prevention and control measures, and the company has strictly adopted grid management measures to ensure that the Ningde base carries out production in an orderly manner.

However, there is also good news. On April 11, Sun Jian, director of the Department of Industry and Information Technology of Jilin Province, said that China FAW has fully started to resume work on the same day, while the first batch of 47 parts and components companies are resuming work in an orderly manner. Previously, on March 13, China FAW decided that all five major vehicle plants in Changchun, including FAW Toyota and FAW-Volkswagen, would stop production.

"It is unavoidable that the consumption momentum under the influence of the epidemic has weakened, the service industry has not fully recovered before the current round of the epidemic, and the retail sales in March are much lower than that of domestic wholesale; the new confirmed cases in the local area in early April are in the rising stage, and the employees of small and medium-sized enterprises are facing huge survival pressure, and the retail sales of the car market in April are expected to be significantly lower than in March." Cui Dongshu predicted.