The automobile works in cycles and the period that the car market has known since the outbreak of Covid seems to be coming to an end. This is one of the major lessons of the annual study by the consulting firm AlixPartners, which is a benchmark in the sector, published on Tuesday, June 27. Since mid-2020, “there was more demand than supply but it’s starting to balance out”, summarizes Laurent Petizon, co-director of automotive studies at AlixPartners France. Thanks to a real reduction in the shortage of semiconductors (the manufacture of chips attributed to the automobile will increase by 53% between 2023 and 2028), production will be more at the rendezvous than in the last three years. Consequence: sales of new cars should increase by 5% in 2023 compared to 2022, to reach 83 million new vehicles registered. And in 2024, the global auto market should be very close to the 89 million registrations of 2019.
This may seem like good news for the economic health of the sector, and therefore for manufacturers. But surely not for everyone. In this new post-Covid world, it is Chinese industry that is emerging stronger. China was already the car’s leading market before 2020. It is now an automotive superpower. This year is indeed marked by two turning points which owe nothing to chance, and rather everything to the rising electrification of car sales. First turning point: in 2023, according to AlixPartners, Chinese brands will for the first time in history be the majority in sales in their own country. Second turning point: in the first quarter of 2023, China was the world’s leading automotive exporter ahead of Japan and Germany. Also a first.
For Europeans, Japanese, Koreans, Americans… formidable competitors are therefore emerging. And these new Chinese entrants (In Europe, they are called MG, BYD, Lynk & Co), are all the more solid in that they are the major beneficiaries of the commercial revival of the coming years in a global car market at several speeds. According to the consulting firm, in the medium term (2027), sales will stabilize in Europe at a level 16% lower than in 2019 (17.4 million against 20.8 million), when in the United States, they will have returned to their pre-Covid figure (17.1 million) and that in China they will be 15% higher than that of the pre-pandemic period (29.1 million against 24.8 million).
First electric market
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