I thought that the rise of domestic new energy vehicles would be the most affected by joint venture brands. But I never expected that the traditional 4S store dealers are currently the most affected.
According to data from the China Automobile Dealers Association, only 37.4% of auto dealers will complete their annual sales targets in 2023, and as many as 23.2% of dealers will have less than 70% of their tasks completed. According to the data of the Passenger Association, 40% of dealers in China will go bankrupt in 2022, and more than half of the auto 4S stores are currently in a loss-making state, with a loss ratio of 60%, an increase of 13.8% over the loss in 2021, of which as much as 66% of the new energy brand 4S stores will lose money, and in 2022, an average of about 11 4S stores will be closed every day.
The strange thing is that these loss-making or bankrupt 4S stores are not only traditional car brands, but also many new energy vehicle brands. So, the question is, why have the sales of new energy vehicles risen, but the 4S store is still in a wave of closure?
According to my observation, there are two types of 4S stores that have closed down, one is the marginal joint venture brands, such as Infiniti, the previous Acura, Dongfeng Citroen and other brands, which have lost their survival space in the domestic market, and their sales have declined seriously, or they have simply withdrawn from the Chinese market.
In 2018, the Wall Street Journal said that the number of new energy vehicle companies in China exceeded 487, but by 2023, there will be more than 40 new domestic car-making forces left.
In the 4S store system, the most difficult may be the sales of traditional fuel 4S stores, and they have become the people who bear the most pressure under the wind and rain. The sales tasks assigned by the automobile OEMs to the dealers will be strictly assigned to each sales consultant. However, due to the decline in the number of customers who enter the store for consultation, or the decrease in the number of customers invited, sales face fines of different amounts, and some sales cannot even complete half of the indicators, so they naturally cannot get too high income.
In the case of the recession of the industry,Many sales choose to leave their jobs and change careers,Some changed careers and ran Didi,Some sell lottery tickets,Some go to change careers to do other sales。
At the beginning of this year, BYD fired the first shot of price reduction, reducing the price of plug-in hybrid models to below 80,000 yuan, and then, Beijing Hyundai, Nezha Automobile, Weilai, Xiaopeng, Chery and other car companies have announced price cuts, according to incomplete statistics, as of now there have been more than 30 car companies to cut prices, most of which are new energy vehicles.
According to the car sales data of the first two weeks of April, the retail sales of passenger cars and new energy vehicles were 516,000, and the retail penetration rate of new energy vehicles reached 50.39%, which also means that the pattern of China's auto market has officially reversed, new energy vehicles have become the mainstream of the market, and people who buy fuel vehicles have become a minority.
Official data shows that in March this year, Honda sold 60,400 new cars in China, a year-on-year plunge of 26.3%, setting a record for the largest year-on-year decline since July 2023. At the same time, Nissan sold 87,000 vehicles in China, down 32.6% year-on-year.
Compared with fuel vehicles, new energy vehicles are also unfavorable to traditional dealers, that is, many new car-making forces adopt the direct sales model, which has fewer central links, better experience and fewer routines than 4S stores, so it is obviously more popular with consumers.
It is foreseeable that the traditional car dealer model will inevitably come to an end in the future, and the traditional dealer system based on 4S stores will continue to shrink in the future.