“Golden September Peak Sales Season” Fainted: Heavy Truck Market Sluggish

The slump of the whole industry led to a barely desirable performance of the heavy truck market. It is learned that because the rapid growth in export and LNG heavy truck, Shaanxi Auto’s performance overmatched the average in the market, the sales in the first 9 months fell slightly by 1.8%. Sales of CNHTC and Foton fell by 23.6% and 23.8% respectively. Meanwhile, FAW Jiefang, whose sales was excluded from the top three in the previous month, has caught up with the No. sales Dongfeng, however, it still dropped by 43%. Because of the high base number last year, Dongfeng, who has been the No. sales for the last several months, has come to a 45.2% drop compared with that in September last year. 

From insiders’ perspective, the weak demand from the end users contributed to the poor performance of the “Golden September”. Analyst from Changjiang Securities believed that the slowing growth of domestic economy has further narrowed the logistic demand of bulk cargo such as coal and cement. Though a rise has been seen in the road haulage for consecutive 2 months, it’s still too weak. With no guarantee in cargo resources, the will of purchasing vehicles for the consumers is restrained. 

It is reported that 14 provincial governments have released the planning for driving local industry, investment and consumption in July and August; the total planning investment has exceeded 12.8 trillion yuan, which has made the it the local version of “4 trillion yuan” stimulating planning. At the beginning of September, the National Development and Reform Commission approved the investment projects on infrastructure with total investment over 700 billion yuan. 

Industry experts believed that the stimulating planning is reasonable under current market. The drop in sales will be close to 30% in 2012 and the rise in market is expected to 10% in 2013.