China’s Electric Car Market Continues To Plunge
Jim Collins, Forbes, 11 February 2020
China’s electric car market, once pipped for “explosive growth” by Bloomberg and other publications, is crashing.
As sales results trickle in from Chinese automakers for January, it is apparent that it was a brutal month for the domestic car industry.
It is clear that sales were pulled ahead into December as automakers attempted to burnish year-end sales figures and that the occurrence of the Lunar New Year, and the accompanying Spring Festival, knocked January sales down. What no model could have incorporated, of course, is the devastating impact of the outbreak of the coronavirus.
The usual post-Golden Week sales snapback will not occur this year, and the Chinese automakers’ association, CPCA, has suggested that sales might fall 50% year-on-year in February following what looks to have been (final sales figures will be released this week) a 20% decline in sales in January.
Against this backdrop, the Chinese electric car (BEV) industry appears to have extended the massive slump that first manifested itself after government subsidies on BEV purchases were halved in July 2019.
China’s electric car market, once pipped for “explosive growth” by Bloomberg and other publications, is crashing. The fallout is clear from early sales results from Chinese BEV makers.
State-controlled BAIC, the number one seller of BEVs in China in 2019, posted a 54.5% year-on-year decline in BEV sales in January, representing an astounding 94.5% sequential decline. BAIC’s BJEV model was the clear winner in the Chinese electric car market in 2019, with about 150,000 units sold, but clearly that momentum has dissipated….
January was a horrible month for electric car sales in China. I don’t see any light at the end of the tunnel as nCoV-2019 is still raging across the Middle Kingdom and taking an almost incomprehensible human toll.
