23.4m record sale of cars by China in 2014 for 6th consecutive year

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BEIJING: China was the top seller of new cars for the sixth consecutive year and more than 23.4 million new cars were sold in China in 2014, although a sluggish economy hurt growth in the sales market, with Japanese automakers bearing the brunt of the sputtering sales.
The China Association of Automobile Manufacturers announced that China was the top seller of new cars for the sixth consecutive year, with 23,491,900 units sold. Although the figure for 2014 was up 6.9 percent over the previous year, the rate of increase was almost halved.
In 2013, sales of new cars in China increased by 13.9 percent from a year earlier, reaching annual sales of 20 million units for the first time in the world.
China’s cooling economy slowed sales between March through November last year, keeping the year-on-year rate of increase at 10 percent or less during the period.
Automakers from abroad expecting economic growth in China had boosted production. But sales did not meet their expectations, resulting in fierce competition and price wars.
The market share of Japanese passenger car sales declined 0.7 percentage point in 2014 to 15.7 percent.
Although Japanese small and midsize cars have sold well in China in recent years, Japanese automakers have been facing increasing competition from Germany’s Volkswagen and General Motors of the United States.
The gap between the share of Japanese cars in 2013, when chilly diplomatic relations between Japan and China hurt the sales of Japanese cars, and hot-selling German car sales widened, with German cars at 20 percent in 2014.
Toyota Motor Corp. sold 1,032,400 cars in China in 2014, up 12.5 percent over the previous year. Although Toyota failed to reach its goal of 1.1 million cars, it marked the first time the automaker sold more than 1 million cars in China.
Sales for Nissan Motor Co. increased 0.5 percent to 1,221,600 cars, while Honda Motor Co. sold 788,276 cars, an increase of 4.1 percent, both of which fell below the rate of increase in overall sales of new cars.
All three leading Japanese automakers failed to achieve their target figures.
A Nissan official attributed its sales struggles in China to “intensified competition in the sales of small and midsize cars.”