Friday, December 03, 2021
Deep red marks on car market
Car manufacturers cannot meet demand
Consumers would like to – but cannot: Manufacturers are often unable to deliver the new vehicles they want. Mostly because they cannot build them in the first place due to the lack of components. However, the forecasts for the coming months are increasingly brighter.
The chip crisis has the German car market firmly under control: In November, new car sales collapsed by almost a third (31.7 percent) to only around 198,000 vehicles, according to the new registration statistics of the Federal Motor Transport Authority. In October the number of new registrations even fell by 35 percent, in September by a good quarter. According to industry information, the reason for the massive decline is the continuing production downtime due to missing components. The car manufacturers have to stop the production lines again and again and send employees home from time to time.
The result: Despite high demand, manufacturers cannot deliver enough new cars. According to KBA, new private registrations fell by 33.4 percent and new commercial registrations by 30.6 percent. All brands – with the exception of BMW’s Mini brand – recorded double-digit declines. Ford was hit hardest, with a drop of 55 percent. Audi and VW also lost significantly with 45 and 42 percent, as did Mercedes with minus 37 percent and BMW with minus 32 percent. At 14.9 percent, VW was again the German brand with the largest share of shares despite the decline.
Despite the high approval deficit, experts are now seeing light at the end of the tunnel. “After all, it has not gotten any worse,” said a spokesman for management consultancy EY. The trend seems broken. This is also indicated by statements from the industry that assume that the chip supply will slowly relax.
Nevertheless, the new registrations are likely to fall below the previous year, which was already bad due to the Corona. The importers’ association VDIK and EY are assuming around 2.6 million car registrations, 300,000 fewer than in 2020. In the first eleven months, the minus is a good eight percent. In total, almost 2.4 million vehicles were handed over to customers.
In the coming year, the car market should recover significantly in view of the high order backlog. The VDIK, for example, expects an increase of 15 percent to around three million vehicles.