Toyota's Chinese market has cut prices and production, and global sales have reached a new high

Recently, a "letter to FAW Toyota's dealer partners" has been widely circulated on the Internet. The main content is that FAW Toyota will reduce production to reduce the pressure on dealers. The specific production reduction plan is that under the premise that production has been significantly reduced in October and November, the distribution will be adjusted downward to 66,000 units in December, 60,000 units in January next year, and 38,000 units in February.

The reason for the reduction in production is to reduce the inventory pressure of dealers, as long as you look at the wholesale sales data, you can see that many car brands are currently pressing goods to suppliers, in order to make the sales data look better.

Judging from the sales data of the passenger association, the current situation of Toyota is indeed not good, although the cumulative sales of FAW Toyota from January to September were 584847, a slight increase of 0.8% year-on-year. However, from January to September this year, GAC Toyota's wholesale sales were 685,800 units, a year-on-year decrease of 10.3%. Moreover, such sales results were achieved under the condition of substantial terminal discounts.

In addition, Toyota Motor has also made mediocre achievements in the field of new energy, launching two electric models, the mid-size SUV bZ4X and the mid-size bZ3. From January to September this year, the sales of the two models were 12,400 and 18,700 respectively, which is not even the sales of a popular model of a new car-making force in a month.

However, as the world's No. 1 car company, Toyota's sales performance in the global market is quite eye-catching. According to Toyota's global production and sales report for the first half of fiscal year 2024 (April 2023-March 2024) (April to September 2023), Toyota's global production has reached 5,058,200 units, an increase of 12.87% over the same period last year, which is the first time in four years that Toyota has set a record for production in the first half of the year. Toyota's overseas sales also hit a record high, reaching 4,382,200 units, a year-on-year increase of 6%.

Toyota, which has suffered a setback in the Chinese market, has seen significant sales growth in other markets, including 790,000 units in Japan, where sales increased by 34% year-on-year to 790,000 units. Sales in India increased by 22 percent, the Middle East by 17 percent, North America by 9.4 percent, and Europe by 7 percent.

It can be seen that in the global market, Toyota still has a strong dominance, and Toyota has shown an obvious ice and fire in the Chinese and foreign markets. So, what to make of this contrast?

In fact, as we said before, the North American market was the most competitive region for global auto brands, but now the Chinese market is the most competitive and involuted.

At present, the price of new energy vehicles in China is the lowest in the world. Last year, China's electric vehicle sales doubled to more than 6 million units, more than double the combined sales of electric vehicles in Europe and the United States, and more than half of global NEV sales. On this battlefield, traditional car companies, new forces, joint venture brands, independent brands, ordinary brands, and luxury brands have fought into a mess, and the price war has hardly been interrupted in terms of products, technology, prices, and the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain.

Therefore, the situation in the Chinese market is actually more convincing, in other words, the decline in Toyota's sales in the Chinese market is a reflection of its declining competitiveness, and it is meaningless to pull the sales volume in overseas markets, and the situation in the Chinese market will be delayed in other overseas markets, depending on the penetration rate of local new energy vehicles.

From another point of view, at present, traditional car brands, including global auto giants, have not yet created a product that is truly capable of competing with China's new energy vehicles.

Therefore, even if Toyota's global sales have reached a new high, we can still firmly believe that if Toyota continues to be so careless in the new energy transition, it will be a matter of time before it is beaten down by domestic car brands, and it is also a matter of time before overseas markets fall one by one.