According to the data recently released by the China Automobile Dealers Association, the mainland imported 225,000 vehicles in the first quarter of this year, a slight decline of 4.5% year-on-year, but the import amount increased by 9.4% year-on-year to 12.75 billion US dollars, and the unit price of imported vehicles increased significantly.
The average price of imported models increased
At present, the average customs declaration price of imported cars is 396,600 yuan, an increase of 6.87% year-on-year. In fact, since 2015, the unit price of mainland automobile import customs declaration has increased year by year. In this regard, the circulation association believes that there are two reasons, one is that the consumption of imported cars is in the trend of upgrading, and on the other hand, the gradual localization of low-cost products.
On the demand side of imported cars, the domestic market sold 195,600 imported cars in the first quarter of this year, down 18.8% year-on-year, of which 26.5% fell in March, mainly due to the shortage of chips. This trend has emerged since 2020, when the import volume of mainland customs and the sales of imported cars fell below the million mark, and the import car market gradually shrank.
Under the trend of overall consumption upgrading of imported cars, consumer demand gathers to ultra-luxury brands, and low-cost ordinary brands have chosen domestic production due to the advantages of the domestic industrial chain, and even withdrawn from the import car market.
At the same time, with the development of the domestic automobile industry, international brand domestic models and independent brand models have greatly improved their product strength, and to a certain extent, consumers' dependence on imported products has been reduced.
The data shows that although the overall imported car market sales fell by 26.5% in March, ultra-luxury brands bucked the trend and increased by 14.4%, while luxury brands and non-luxury brands fell by 25.5% and 38.7% respectively, with serious differentiation. From the cumulative data from January to March, imported ultra-luxury and luxury brands accounted for 91.8% (of which ultra-luxury brands accounted for 1%), and imported cars continued to consolidate the positioning of high-end market segments.
From the perspective of subdivision brands, from January to March, Lexus, Mercedes-Benz and BMW still occupy the top three, but only Mercedes-Benz achieved a year-on-year increase of 4.3%, and Lexus and BMW fell by 23.5% and 29.0% respectively. It is worth noting that with the gradual recovery of parallel imports, the Toyota brand achieved a high growth of 24.8%, and the hot sales of MPV models such as Toyota Senna are the reasons for Toyota's growth, which also promotes the growth of MPV models.
In the model direction, MPV is the only model in all segments to achieve growth, with a year-on-year growth rate of 13.0%, and sedans and SUVs fell by 20.1% and 19.6% respectively.
The growth rate of new energy imports has accelerated
With the growth rate of the trend of electrification transformation of global car companies, the import of new energy models has increased year by year in recent years. Among them, the sales of imported new energy vehicles in 2019 increased by an abnormal 191%, mainly driven by the import of Tesla Model 3; after its domestic production, the sales of imported new energy vehicles fell to normal levels in 2020, at 27,000 units.
In 2021, the plug-in hybrid model will continue to grow by 26% to 35,000 units. In the first quarter of this year, imported new energy vehicles performed better than the overall level, with a total of 5,400 units sold.
Xiaoxiang Morning News reporter Hu Xiong