The car market is weak, is spring far?

Editor’s note: This article is from “Future Car Daily” (WeChat public ID: auto-time), author: Pan Lei.

The new car market or missed

Author | Pan Lei

Edit | Liang Chen

The new car market this year’s “Golden September and Silver 10” may be lost. According to the report of the China Radio and Television General’s Voice of China, “The Evening Peak of the News”, it is actually not only this year, but the car market in September and October in recent years is hard to come by. Shen Jinjun, president of the China Automobile Dealers Association, said in the report that because the overall demand for the market is not very strong, the law of “Golden September and Silver 10” may be broken in the past decade.

Undoubtedly, the trend of the new car market seems to have also spread to the used car market.

On the afternoon of October 9, the data released by the China Automobile Dealers Association showed that the number of used cars in the country was 1,198,600 in August, an increase of 0.92% year-on-year and a decrease of 1.19% from the previous month, a significant slowdown from July.

From January to August of 2019, the cumulative transaction volume of used cars in the country was 9.273 million units, an increase of 3.89% over the same period of last year. The cumulative transaction amount was 588 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 5.42%.

Compared with the data of 1.958 million new cars in the same period and a 6.9% year-on-year decline, the used cars have achieved positive growth, but the growth rate has slowed down and entered the era of “micro-growth”.

To some extent, the used car market follows the market and has entered the industry adjustment period.

For the question of when the industry will recover, Lang Xuehong, deputy secretary-general of the China Automobile Dealers Association, said that the auto market will continue to bottom out next year, 2021, 2022, at the monthly meeting of the Bozhi Macro Forum hosted by the China Development Research Foundation in late September. It will only return to the pre-adjustment level in the year, and it will only hit 30 million units in 2023.

Morgan Stanley’s forecast is slightly more optimistic, arguing that passenger car sales forecast growth rate in 2020 is 1-2%, because “2020 is the change cycle driven by consumption upgrades.”

If the forecast of Morgan Stanley comes true, it means that the new car market will usher in recovery, and the used car market will be re-active with the arrival of the car change cycle.

This forecast can be used in this year’s Eleventh Golden Week