Article| Top Finance Ning Xiaomin, Li Lin
With the development dividend of new energy vehicles, the trend of "independent development, joint venture withdrawal" in the domestic automobile market is becoming increasingly obvious. According to the data released by the Passenger Car Association, in April this year, the domestic retail share of self owned brands increased by 9 percentage points year-on-year to 57.4%; The cumulative share from January to April was 56%, an increase of 6.3 percentage points over the same period last year.
In the wholesale market, the share of self owned brands is close to 65%, and the year-on-year growth rate is also striking. Correspondingly, the market share of joint venture brands has declined in an all-round way, among which the Japanese brand is the most obvious. In April this year, the retail share of Japanese brands was 15.2%, down 3.6 percentage points year on year, 1.4 percentage points higher than that of German brands.
In the context of continued price war, the sales of three traditional Japanese brands Toyota, Honda and Nissan were affected to varying degrees, which further affected the net profits of the parent company GAC Group and Dongfeng Motor Group. In particular, GAC Honda has fallen out of the top ten in terms of retail sales and wholesale sales.
In the domestic automobile market in April, due to the continued price war, consumers had a strong wait-and-see atmosphere, and the overall sales growth slowed down. However, the self owned brand still achieved good results, and sales remained high. According to the data released by the Passenger Car Association, BYD, Chery and Geely ranked top three in the wholesale sales list of manufacturers in April, with year-on-year growth rates of 49.0%, 47.6% and 39.3% respectively.
In the retail sales ranking in the same period, BYD (002594. SZ), Chery and Geely (00175. HK) also ranked the top three in terms of year-on-year sales growth, which were 31.1%, 31.2% and 59.8% respectively.
BYD is currently the leader of domestic new energy vehicles. The rapid growth of sales is not surprising to the outside world. What is really worth noting is the data of Chery and Geely, which are accelerating to catch up with BYD by virtue of their rapidly growing sales.
This is more obvious in the sales volume in the first four months of this year.
According to the data of the Passenger Car Association, from January to April, BYD's wholesale sales totaled 936400 vehicles, up 23.6% year on year; The sales of Chery and Geely in the same period were 685300 and 628900, respectively, with year-on-year growth of 60.9% and 46.9%, far exceeding that of BYD, and far exceeding that of Chang'an, FAW Volkswagen, SAIC Volkswagen, Great Wall Motors and other automobile enterprises.
In terms of retail sales growth, BYD's sales growth from January to April this year was 13.2% year on year. On the basis of increasing base, Chery and Geely still achieved 80.9% and 42.5% year-on-year growth, which is also much higher than BYD's.
As a car company with a high number of domestic export cars, Chery's overseas market sales accounted for about 50% of its total sales. From the above data of wholesale sales and retail sales, we can see that its overseas market still maintained a rapid growth, while expanding its domestic market, and finally formed a trend of both wholesale sales and retail sales growth.
Geely Automobile, by virtue of its Geely Emgrand, Boyue, Geekrypton, LinkedIn and many other brands, has made efforts in various subdivisions. Although its sales volume is not top-notch, its influence cannot be ignored. The cumulative delivery volume of Krypton cars has exceeded 250000, which has gained a firm foothold in the luxury car market. Since the launch of the Galaxy brand last year, the cumulative sales volume of various models, including Galaxy L7 and Galaxy L6, has also exceeded 120000.
From the perspective of the pattern of independent brands, it is difficult to change the dominance of BYD for the time being, but the continuous efforts of Chery and Geely may not be impossible to catch up with BYD. Most importantly, the rapid development of independent brands, including the three automobile enterprises mentioned above, has brought a huge impact on joint venture brands, ending the era when joint venture brands such as Volkswagen, Buick, Toyota and Honda dominated the domestic automobile market.
In the Top 10 list of retail sales of passenger cars in the narrow sense of April released by the Passenger Association, only FAW Volkswagen ranked first, ranking second, with sales of 119000 vehicles. The other listed SAIC Volkswagen, GAC Toyota, Dongfeng Nissan, FAW Toyota and Brilliance BMW ranked last, ranking sixth to tenth respectively, and their sales declined by varying degrees year on year.
Among them, the sales of Toyota's two joint ventures in China fell the most year on year, with GAC Toyota declining 32.1% and FAW Toyota declining 31.3%. It was followed by SAIC Volkswagen, FAW Volkswagen, Dongfeng Nissan and BMW Brilliance, with a decline of 21.7%, 15.6%, 9.6% and 7.9% respectively.
Honda, which used to be a frequent customer at the top of the domestic sales list, failed to rank in the top 10 of the retail sales list in April. Public data shows that in April, GAC Honda sold 33500 vehicles and Dongfeng Honda sold 40300 vehicles, down 44.61% and 17.28% year on year respectively. Dongfeng Honda, which has a good sales volume, is nearly 10000 vehicles behind Brilliance BMW (49000 vehicles), which ranks the tenth. It can be seen that Honda's sales in China have declined more seriously than Toyota and Nissan.
The decline in sales of many joint venture brands such as FAW Volkswagen is related to the rapid rise of independent brands with the help of new energy vehicles on the one hand, and also to the background of continued price war on the other hand. In the case of price wars among major automobile enterprises in turn, joint venture brands are cautious about price wars in order to keep profits, and the marketing routines of 4S stores also affect consumers' choices.
The direct consequence of this "need and need" mentality is the decline of profits, which will drag down the performance of the parent company. The performance report released by GAC Group (601238. SH) shows that in 2023, the net profit attributable to the parent company will be about 4.429 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 44.48%; By the first quarter of 2024, although the decline of net profit attributable to the parent company has slowed down, the year-on-year decline is still more than 20%. It is generally believed that an important reason for the continuous decline of GAC Group's net profit is the continuous decline of sales of GAC Toyota and GAC Honda joint ventures.
According to the performance report issued by SAIC Group (600104. SH), in 2023, SAIC Volkswagen will achieve a revenue of 140.275 billion yuan and a net profit of 3.132 billion yuan, which will be significantly lower than the revenue of 164.715 billion yuan and the net profit of 8.729 billion yuan in 2022, especially the net profit, which will decline by more than 50% year on year. This also led to a year-on-year decline of 12.48% in SAIC Group's net profit attributable to the parent company in 2023.
Compared with GAC Group and SAIC Group, the decline in sales of joint venture brands has a more obvious impact on Dongfeng Group (00489. HK). The after tax profit of Dongfeng Nissan fell from 10.797 billion yuan in 2022 to 394 million yuan in 2023, which became an important reason for the loss of Dongfeng Group for the first time since its listing.
Of course, in the face of the attack of its own brand, the joint venture brand also launched a counterattack by accelerating the development of new energy and other means. For example, Honda China released a new pure electric brand "Ye" in April, and announced three models at one go, which will be launched from the end of this year. Chang'an Mazda announced the new new energy product EZ-6 at the Beijing Auto Show, trying to establish a value benchmark for joint venture new energy intermediate vehicles. GAC Honda has introduced more preferential car purchase policies for its Accord, Civic, Stylist and other products.
Whether the various measures taken by the joint venture brand can help sales recover, and what measures will be taken by BYD, Geely, Chery, Chang'an, Great Wall and other independent brands to consolidate their advantages, deserve our continued attention.
