Even though the market itself is growing
Chinese automakers published sales statistics for March of this year, and in it the ITHome resource noticed an interesting trend: sales of Chinese branded cars are not only not growing, but the market itself is growing, — they dive down. The most telling point: sales of the big Japanese three (Honda, Nissan and Toyota) in March were lower than BYD alone. The reluctance of the Chinese to buy cars from Japanese brands has led to a significant reduction in the share of the latter from a peak of 30% to 14.4% in March of this year.
Honda sales declined the most in China. In March, the Dongfeng Honda joint venture sold 28 thousand cars, a year-on-year decline — by 51.5%. Sales at another joint venture fell by 50.1% — GAC Honda.
The situation for Nissan is not much better: in March, 87 thousand Nissan cars were sold on the Chinese market (mostly produced by the Dongfeng Nissan joint venture) — 32.6% less than in March 2023.
The joint venture GAC Toyota has approximately the same level of sales decline: 55.3 thousand cars were sold in March, which is 32% less than in March last year. Statistics on another joint venture — FAW Toyota — has not yet been announced, but given that the company has introduced discounts on its cars of up to 2.2 thousand dollars, the statistics are unlikely to be better than those of another joint venture. Only the new Land Cruiser 250, which has become a hit in China (5,000 orders in just an hour), can only save Toyota’s position and partially offset the decline, but the demand for the new Camry is extremely sluggish — the same 5000 orders were collected for a whole month.
In total, excluding FAW Toyota sales statistics, the three Japanese brands sold 202 300 cars in China in a month. For comparison, BYD sold 301 631 cars in the domestic market last month.