From Autoblog:

With more than 5.9M vehicles sold in China last year, the country has become the second-largest automobile market in the world, moving ahead of Japan (which saw 5.8M new vehicles sold in 2005). China’s sales represented 8.7% of the world market, or about double its share back in 2001.

Not surprisingly, 5.76M of those vehicles were domestically produced, as China’s market remains very difficult to crack for importers.

The market in China remains highly fragmented, with the largest producer - First Auto Works - grabbing less than 17% of the market.

One of my friends told me: “I don’t know much about China, but if you multiply anything by one billion, it’s fine with me.” This is true, but you cannot always multiply things by one billion in the case of China, whose domestic market remains very difficult to get into. Lack of regulation in some cases, over-regulation in others, and lack of a developed domestic demand (China’s growth is mainly export-driven, not driven by consumption) are real challenges, which need to be faced if one wants to even get a chance of getting close to the one billion multiplication. Given the export-driven growth, it is nice to see that consumption grows, in this case with cars. Still, domestic cars take the majority of car sales in 2005. Let’s see what 2006 brings.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 17th, 2006 at 9:22 am and is filed under Business, China. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.