In the past 3 months, a large number of new cars have emerged in the automobile circle, such as Geely Galaxy L6/L7 Longteng Edition, Leap C10, Ideal MEGA, BYD Yuan PLUS Glory Edition, etc., among which the most eye-catching is the Xiaomi SU7 launched on March 28, which was officially announced to be 89,000 units in 24 hours.
On March 31, the Xiaomi Auto App showed that the delivery time for some orders of the Xiaomi SU7 has been scheduled for about half a year.
While it seems to be lively, the overall sales data of the domestic auto market in March is not so ideal, and it is still in a state of slow start.
According to the data released by the China Passenger Car Association on April 9, the retail sales of domestic narrow passenger cars in March were 1.687 million units, a year-on-year increase of 6.0%, reversing the decline in February due to the Spring Festival holiday, but the sales volume was still at a low level in the same period in recent years.
The reason why this is the case is because after the Spring Festival, the major car companies launched new cars at the same time, the price has also continued to fall, especially after entering March, only on March 1, 9 car companies announced price cuts or limited-time discounts one after another, and the continuous rise in price wars has led to serious wait-and-see sentiment among some consumers, which has affected the transaction volume of the terminal market.
The situation is completely different at the wholesale level, with the recovery of production and the increase in export efforts, especially the latter exceeding the 400,000 mark for the first time to reach 406,000 units, and wholesale sales in March increased by 10.1% y/y to 2.189 million units, surpassing the 2.122 million units in 2018 and becoming a record high for the same period in history.
Looking at the overall trend in the first quarter of this year, although retail and wholesale both fell by about 20% year-on-year in February, they still increased by 13.1% and 10.6% year-on-year, respectively, thanks to the sharp growth achieved on a low base in January.
Seven of the top 10 automakers are independent
In March, the retail sales of the independent increased by 19% year-on-year to 930,000 units, with a market share of 54.8%, an increase of 6 percentage points year-on-year, and the cumulative share in the first quarter continued to stabilize at 55%, an increase of 5.4 percentage points over the same period last year.
In March, the year-on-year increase in the wholesale market also continued to remain at a high level of 59.3%, an increase of 6.4 percentage points year-on-year. According to the statistics of the China Passenger Car Association, the export volume of passenger cars in March was able to set a new record, thanks to the fact that the company also reached a record 341,000 units.
Echoing the increase in market share and sales, the number of market leaders among domestic automakers increased in March, and this was particularly evident in wholesale sales.
In March, 7 of the top 10 automakers in wholesale sales were independent automakers, which should be the month with the highest number of automakers in the list in recent years.
Specifically, in March, the traditional off-season, BYD's wholesale sales rushed to 300,000 units, which was very surprising. After all, at the end of the fourth quarter of last year, BYD was able to reach the same level.
And such outstanding results in March this year are mainly due to the fact that after the Spring Festival, the glory versions of its Qin PLUS, Destroyer 05, Dolphin, Song PRO, Han, Tang, Song PLUS, Seal DM-i and Yuan PLUS models were launched and delivered one after another, and a large number of orders were received.
According to BYD's official data, Qin PLUS and Song PLUS both exceeded 40,000 units, and the Yuan family and Seagull also had more than 30,000 units, and about 150,000 units were sold in these four models alone, plus 300,000 other models were naturally not a problem.
As for Chery Automobile, although there is a large gap between the volume and BYD, with the joint help of a variety of models such as Tiggo 8, Tiggo 7, Arrizo 8, Ou Mengda 5, Jietu X70 and Jietu Traveler, it has won the favor of many consumers in both domestic and overseas markets, so it is the only car company with a year-on-year increase of more than 50% in retail and wholesale sales in March.
It is also worth mentioning that Chery has not yet announced its export sales in March, but due to the gap of 100,000 units between retail and wholesale, Chery Group said that its cumulative export volume in the first quarter was 253,000 units, and its export volume in the first two months was 169,000 units, which shows that the export volume in March was roughly about 80,000 units.
This means that Chery Automobile alone accounted for about 20% of passenger car exports in March.
Although there is a big gap between Geely and Changan and FAW-Volkswagen in the retail list, relying on the blessing of 4-50,000 exports, the gap between the wholesale sales of these two and North Volkswagen has narrowed significantly, and it can even be said that they are very likely to pull them off the podium again in the third place.
Compared with the first four, Great Wall Motor, SAIC Passenger Vehicle and SAIC-GM-Wuling ranked lower, but the growth rate of Great Wall and SAIC-GM-Wuling was significantly better than the overall market and the three joint venture car companies in the list, while SAIC Passenger Vehicle will be negative year-on-year because the comparison base is its all-time high of 81,000 units in the same period.
At the same time, the only three remaining automakers in the joint venture camp in the wholesale list, except for SAIC Volkswagen, which increased by 11.1% year-on-year, FAW-Volkswagen was negative year-on-year, and Tesla, which had a strong growth momentum, only increased slightly by 0.2%.
Originally, March was supposed to be the peak of Tesla's deliveries in the Chinese market, but its retail sales fell by 18.6% year-on-year, does this mean that its demand in the Chinese market has decreased significantly?
The penetration rate of new energy soared to 41.6%
From the perspective of market segments, after falling due to the Spring Festival in February, the new energy market recovered rapidly in March.
Retail sales increased by 29.5% y/y to 709,000 units, while wholesale sales increased by 31.1% y/y to 810,000 units. It should be noted that the new energy penetration rate of domestic retail sales reached 41.6% in March, an increase of 7.6 percentage points year-on-year, replacing 40.4% in November last year, becoming the highest record of new energy penetration rate in domestic retail.
As domestic passenger car exports are still dominated by fuel vehicles, the new energy penetration rate of wholesale sales in March remained at 37%.
The rapid and substantial recovery of new energy sales in March was mainly due to the strong growth of plug-in hybrid (including range extender), whose retail and wholesale sales increased by 75.4% and 88.6% year-on-year, respectively.
If we make a more detailed distinction, we will find that the growth momentum of the range extender is ahead of the plug-in hybrid, but due to the larger volume, the latter creates more new increments than the former. Wholesale sales in March, for example, increased by 103% y/y to 76,000 units and plug-in hybrids increased by 84% y/y to 229,000 units, creating new increases of 105,000 and 39,000 units, respectively.
If analyzed from the market level, the plug-in mix can obtain such a large number of increments in March, and the price war is indispensable.
As mentioned at the beginning of the article, the 2024 models launched by BYD, Geely and other car companies are all lower than the 2023 models, which directly promotes a large number of interested consumers to place orders to buy, especially after the Qin PLUS DM-i Glory Edition lowered the starting price to 79,800 yuan, which caused a huge market. You must know that the starting price of the Qin PLUS DM-i Champion Edition was 99,800 yuan, which is equivalent to a direct 20% discount.
In addition, it is also worth noting that the year-on-year growth rate of pure electric retail sales in the first quarter continued to narrow to 14.7%, and the year-on-year growth rate of wholesale still hovered within 10%, which may mean that the growth rate of the whole year will end in single digits.
In terms of the traditional three major segments of body form, the trend of SUVs surpassing sedans is irreversible, whether it is retail sales or wholesale sales, or the corresponding year-on-year growth.
As for the smallest MPV market, although new models such as Xpeng X9 and Li MEGA have recently appeared, and the 2024 Denza D9 has also been launched in early March, the segment still seems to be in trouble, with retail sales falling by 5.6% year-on-year again in March, resulting in a direct negative year-on-year retail sales in the first quarter of this year.
In the following April, with the convening of the Beijing Auto Show, there will be a number of new cars on the market one after another, and a new round of price adjustment will come.