With the advent of the Chinese New Year, most automobile manufacturers in the country have taken the initiative to announce their new targets for 2015. Most of the announced targets are fairly optimistic, hovering around the ten percent rate, much better than a lot of the foreign forecasts for the market’s growth this year. Worth noting is that many local own brand manufacturers have decided to take the lead this year, announcing very ambitious sales targets for 2015.
In 2014, only a few domestic own brands, such as Changan and GAC, were able to complete their sales targets for the year. Many of these manufacturers even saw their sales growth fall over the first three quarters of the year.
One example of such a manufacturer is Jianghuai Motors, which has announced a 2015 sales goal of 300,000 vehicles, over 50 percent of its sales target from last year. JAC, which is paring down its sedan business, is looking to benefit from the country’s growing SUV market. The manufacturer benefited strongly from sales of the S3 last year. Another manufacturer looking to take advantage of the SUV market is GAC’s own brand Trumpchi, which has announced its intention to achieve sales of at least 160,000 vehicles this year.
Chery and Great Wall have set relatively optimistic sales growth targets this year, both of which represent year-on-year growth of approximately 16 percent. Chery is looking to benefit from overseas sales, which it hopes will help it sell 400,000 vehicles this year. By comparison, Geely and Changan have announced much more conservative targets, both of which are in the single digits.
On another note, the luxury automobile market in China is still reeling from the anti-monopoly and anti-corruption legislation leveled against manufacturers this past year. Despite this, the luxury automobile manufacturer still posted strong growth rates above the industry average. Audi, BMW and Mercedes-Benz have continued to debut new models, while second-tier manufacturers Jaguar Land Rover, Infiniti and Volvo also performed strongly.
When it comes to this year, leading manufacturer Audi posted a sales target of 700,000 vehicles for this year, up over 20 percent from last year’s sales goal. Rival BMW has set a much more conservative target that is only 45,000 units greater than the previous year’s goal. Meanwhile, Jaguar Land Rover and Lexus have yet to publically announce sales targets for 2015.
