A serious recession casts shadow in Chines high-end vehicle market, especially the market segment of imported ones. The overall sales of high-end vehicles in China in the first half of the year reached 930,000 units, a year-on-year increase of 9 percent, while years before the increase rate reached 20 percent or so.
The production structure of high-end vehicle market remains stable, with new high-end SUV expansion slowing down. Most high-end SUV models launched recently lack originality. For example, Audi Q3 and BMW X1 small SUV have gained much popularity, thus they failed to give rise to the manufactures’ overall sales.
The domestic production, rather than import method, has helped foreign automakers to realize sales growth in terms of high-end vehicles. Those high-end vehicles produced in China have increased 24 percent from a year earlier, while the imported ones decreased 7 percent compared with the same period of last year. The overall demand expansion for high-end vehicles that built in China is slowing down, but that for imported ones is slumping.
On the other hand, parallel imported vehicles of high end accounted less than 10 percent, lacking the great influence to alter the overall selling price of foreign vehicle.
Audi, BMW and Mercedes-Benz still grabbed the most part of the high-end vehicle market, with overall market share reaching 72 percent. They are adding discounts to their products, which results in the overall selling price reduction of the high-end vehicle market.
China still remains to be the biggest market for high-end vehicles. Though annual sales of high-end vehicles in EU of 1.9 million units seems a little higher than 1.72 million units of China, the value of these models is relatively much higher in China than other market as the average income of Chinese people falls far behind than Europeans.
