In the past two years, stimulated by the "price war", domestic automobile demand has been continuously released, passenger car sales have continued to rise, and the sales of luxury car segments have also risen.
According to the number of passenger cars that can most directly reflect the terminal transaction volume of the market, driven by traditional luxury brands such as BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Audi, Hongqi and Lexus, as well as new energy high-end brands such as Tesla, Li Motor, NIO and Denza, domestic luxury car sales (including domestic and imported) will reach a new high in 2023, with a year-on-year increase of 19.7% to 5.017 million units.
This is the first time that the annual sales volume of the luxury segment in mainland China has crossed the threshold of 5 million units, and the share of the passenger car market has also climbed to a new record of 22.9%.
After reaching the best results in sales and market share in 2023, the luxury car market has made a new breakthrough in the first quarter of this year, with sales increasing by 16.9% year-on-year to 1.206 million units, and its market share also increasing to 24.4%. This is equivalent to the fact that one out of every five passenger cars sold in China in the first quarter of this year is a luxury car.
It is worth mentioning that the market share of luxury cars even reached 26.5% in March, replacing 25.7% in the same period last year, becoming the highest monthly record in recent years.
New energy has become the main force of growth
The unstoppable trend of luxury cars mainly depends on the rapid development of high-end new energy brands.
As we all know, the sales of traditional fuel vehicles, which account for the vast majority of the domestic passenger car market, have fallen for several consecutive years in recent years, and the same is true for luxury cars, but slightly later than the overall car market.
Due to the late start, the number and sales of new energy brands in the early stage are small, and they cannot be compared with traditional brands such as Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Audi that have been cultivated for many years (there are new energy models, but the sales volume is very small, mainly traditional fuel vehicles), and it is not until 2021 that the volume of Tesla, Ideal, Weilai and other brands increases rapidly, and new energy gradually replaces traditional fuel as the main driving force for the growth of luxury cars.
In addition, with the continuous improvement of consumer recognition, the sales of range-extender models such as Ideal, Denza and Wenjie will explode in 2023, and pure electric brands such as Tesla, Zeekr and Zhiji will also continue to make efforts, and the new energy penetration rate of luxury cars will increase to 37.4%, exceeding the 33.3% of the overall passenger car market.
Driven by plug-in hybrids (including range extenders) and pure electric vehicles, the new energy penetration rate of the luxury car market even exceeded the threshold of 40% in the first quarter of this year, reaching 40.4%.
Specifically, Tesla, as the leader of new energy luxury cars in the first quarter, sold slightly lower than the same period last year.
This is because more and more competitors are pouring into the market segments where the Model 3 and Model Y are located, especially the active participation of domestic brands in the price war, which has intensified market competition, and Tesla's sales have fallen for two consecutive months in February and March this year.
Indeed, today's Chinese new energy market is no longer the same as it was in the past two years - Tesla will "shake three times" when it "roars". Therefore, Tesla had no choice but to compromise, and announced on April 21 that all its products would be reduced by 14,000 yuan, and I wonder if this wave of operations can allow it to revive sales.
The sales volume is second only to Tesla's Question and Ideal, which are the two major contributors to the significant improvement in the new energy penetration rate of the luxury car market in the first quarter, with a total of 108,000 new increments.
With the blessing of Huawei's intelligent driving, after the new model was launched on September 12 last year, the M7 has achieved great success, with monthly sales of more than 10,000 units for half a year, plus the M5 and M9, the sales volume of the M7 has reached more than 20,000 units since December last year. As a result, 86,000 units were sold in the first quarter of this year, almost 8.5 times that of the same period last year.
Next, with the mass delivery of the new M5 and M9, the M9 should continue to provide a huge impetus for the growth of the luxury car market.
At the beginning of this year, it obviously encountered some difficulties in the delivery of the 2024 L7, L8 and L9 and the new model MEGA, but due to the large discounts, the sales of the 2023 L products are still very impressive, so the sales in the first quarter still reached 85,000 units, a year-on-year increase of 58.0%.
In addition to the above two, the new energy high-end brands that provided more than 10,000 new increments in the first quarter also include ZEEKR and Equation Leopard.
After the mid-term facelift was launched at the end of February this year, the sales of ZEEKR 001 increased significantly, and in January, ZEEKR 007 also officially began large-scale delivery, and ZEEKR sold 32,000 units in the first quarter, doubling year-on-year. Although there is only one product under its umbrella, the Leopard 5 has a place in the hard-core off-road SUV market by relying on the advantages of price, endurance and fuel consumption.
There are no discounts, and BMW Benz can't sell it
As for the traditional luxury camp, although Audi, Hongqi and Lexus also created a certain amount of new growth in the first quarter of this year, most brands were negative year-on-year, and even BMW and Mercedes-Benz, among the big three, did not escape the fate of the decline, falling by 5.1% and 10.1% respectively.
Through the study of its models, it was found that the former was mainly due to the BMW 5 Series, and the latter was affected by the Mercedes-Benz E-Class, and the sales of these two models in the first quarter were nearly halved year-on-year.
In December last year, the Mercedes-Benz E-class, and in January this year, the BMW 5 Series ushered in the launch of a new generation of models, and the launch of the new car will inevitably mean preferential recycling.
Statistics show that the average transaction price of Mercedes-Benz E-class E300L luxury last year was about 500,000 yuan, but it soared to 610,000 yuan in the first two months of this year, and although it fell to 560,000 yuan in March, there is still a gap of nearly 50,000 yuan with the price of the old model. The situation of the BMW 5 Series is much the same, taking the 532Li leading model as an example, the average transaction price last year was about 440,000 yuan, and the new model rose to about 510,000 yuan in February this year, and dropped to 480,000 yuan in March.
In a highly competitive environment, the reduction of terminal discounts will undoubtedly become a major disadvantage affecting trading volume. As a result, the performance of both has been relatively poor recently, with the Mercedes-Benz E-Class having been less than 10,000 units for four consecutive months, and the BMW 5 Series has only more than 3,000 units in the past two months, resulting in a decrease of 21,000 units in the first quarter of this year compared with the same period last year, which has affected the trend of the entire brand.
As of the first quarter of this year, BMW is still the champion of the domestic luxury car market, but according to the recent performance of the 5 Series, if the follow-up cannot recover quickly, BMW is very likely to be surpassed by Audi next.
As for Audi, Hongqi and Lexus, they will be among the few "lucky ones" in the traditional luxury camp, and the reasons are much the same.
Compared with the proud Mercedes-Benz and BMW, Audi is very relaxed. For example, after the launch of the 2024 Audi A6L in October last year, the price was quickly lowered to about the same as the previous model, so sales did not change much.
After several consecutive years of declining sales in the Chinese market, Lexus, which was known as the "king of price increases" last year, has finally stepped down from the altar and started to reduce prices, so its sales in 2023 will be roughly the same as in 2022. Taking the all-new Lexus RZ launched in February last year as an example, the maximum discount for the whole car in some regions is 60,000 yuan, which means that the starting price has dropped to 295,900 yuan.
Therefore, although Lexus increased by 40.2% year-on-year in the first quarter of this year, it was more due to the low base of the same period last year, and it is still at a low level compared with 5 or 60,000 units in the same period in 2021 and 2022.
Like Lexus, Hongqi was able to increase by nearly 40% in the first quarter of this year, in addition to providing large discounts, the launch of new models such as H6 and HS3 last year is also an important reason.
To sum up, if the price does not meet consumer expectations, even Mercedes-Benz BMW, as a luxury car giant, will not be able to sell, especially when new energy products have poured in, if you want more sales, you must put down your body.