Text/Paula
Weilai's delivery time waits for at least two months, Tesla's order delivery time is scheduled to next year, the news that car manufacturers have no cars to sell has always appeared in the news in the past six months, and now it seems that it is no longer news, it has become the norm.
So are the car manufacturers really running out of cars to sell? In fact, this is not the case, this is just the waterlogging death, the drought death brought to us by the illusion.
Fuel car dealers: it's all rumors!
No car to sell is indeed a fact, but this is only a fact for new energy manufacturers, the front Tesla and Weilai are "waterlogged" new energy companies, but for most traditional car companies, no car to sell is a blatant rumor.
On March 29, 2022, the China Automobile Dealers Association released the China Automobile Dealers Inventory Early Warning Index Survey, saying that the Inventory Warning Index of Chinese Automobile Dealers in April 2022 was 66.4%, up 10 percentage points year-on-year and 2.8 percentage points month-on-month. The 66.4% inventory warning index is out of the table, which indicates that most dealers will face great inventory pressure.
So why is there such a large inventory pressure, the author believes that there are mainly several aspects such as the saturation of the automobile market, the squeeze of the new energy market and the impact of the epidemic.
In April, passenger car sales fell by more than 30% year-on-year, and the auto market tended to be saturated
According to the data of the Association of Automobile Manufacturers, the decline in automobile sales in April was serious, and the general environment of the automobile market was not optimistic.
In April, the national passenger car market retailed 1.052 million units, down 35% year-on-year and 33% from the previous month; in April, the national passenger car manufacturers wholesaled 903,000 units, down 46% year-on-year and 50% month-on-month. The average daily retail sales of 35,000 vehicles, down 35% year-on-year, the Chinese auto market is relatively sluggish, since 2017, the volume of the mainland market has basically not increased, the car market is also saturated.
Not only has the Chinese market entered a trough, but the global market has also shown a downward trend under the influence of production suspension, price increases, Russian-Ukrainian conflicts, and supply chain crises.
New energy vehicles squeeze the traditional fuel vehicle market
China has become the largest market in the new energy market, contributing more than half of the global sales of new energy vehicles, and China's new energy market is still expanding. Domestic new energy vehicle sales rose 146.6% year-on-year in the first quarter, and in April, sales of 282,000 units, up 78.4% year-on-year.
In the case of the same volume in the Chinese market, new energy sales can only achieve sales growth by squeezing the market share of traditional fuel vehicles. Therefore, under the trend of stopping growth or even shrinking in the volume of the automobile market, the essence of the growth of new energy vehicle sales is the decline in sales of traditional oil vehicles.
The market share is divided, and the traditional car companies cannot escape the fate of declining sales, so the vehicles that have been produced before will become the inventory of dealers, and it is not surprising that the inventory warning index is high.
The impact of the fluctuating epidemic is relatively large
Under the influence of the epidemic, the planned sales of dealers have been disrupted, and consumers' willingness to spend will also be hit.
The postponement or cancellation of the auto show will completely disrupt the dealership sales plan and make it difficult to clear inventory. The beijing auto show, which is a two-year industry, was originally scheduled to be launched in April this year, but due to the announcement of the postponement of the epidemic, which disrupted the new car listing plan of many car companies, some products will be postponed with the postponement of the auto show, then the dealer promotion inventory and new car pre-sale work can not be carried out, the original inventory clearance will be difficult to achieve, there will always be inventory pressure.
In addition, whether there is pressure on inventory ultimately depends on consumers, if consumers are willing to buy, then there is no inventory pressure, but the epidemic has hit consumers' willingness to buy.
Due to the pandemic, consumer demand has been reduced. First of all, the consumer's action to go to the store to see the car is restricted, and there is no real car, so the enthusiasm for buying a car will definitely be greatly reduced. In addition, in the past few years of the epidemic, the income of most consumers is full of instability, in the face of salary cuts or even layoffs, consumers who buy a car are certainly cautious, and their willingness will not be as strong as when their incomes were stable before.