Audi and other luxury car brands drop sharply with sales downturn in China

Several multinational automakers have been warned by their headquarters that theirmarket profits in China will drop, reasons behind which are that the growth of Chinese economy has lost its steam and that Chinese domestic brands have raised their competitiveness.

Last month, Chinese car market was shrouded with downturn, with passenger cars sales increasing slightly compared with the same period of last year. Besides the year-to-May passenger cars sales growth remained slow. And the once-flourishing luxury brands were also affected. Compared with previous months, some luxury cars were encounteredwith sharp drop in sales in May.

According to statistics of auto.gasgoo.com, Audi, BMW and JRL witnessed lower sales in May than the same period of last year. Audi had a sales slip year-on-year, cutting the 26-month consecutive period of grow. Followed by Audi A6, Audi Q3 has the sharpest sales drop, plummeting by 45.3% from last year’s 8,494 units to 4,644 units. BMW had a first drop since the beginning of 2015, with 5.5% drop in May. JRL sales dropped 32.1% in May on a year-on-year basis and its year-to-date sales decline reached 23.0%compared with the same period of last year.

On the other hand, Porsche gained the highest increase in China among other luxury car brands, with more than 70% year-on-year increase on. Infiniti also witnessed a 49.9% increase year-on-year. Besides, Mercedes-Benz, Cadillac and DS remained growth in May. Generally, among luxury brands about half of them gained sales growth and the other half were encountered with sales drop.

Views vary from person to person on reasons for sales slide of luxury brands. Some held that it was the personnel change in the enterprises management that resulted in the decrease. And some maintained that the reason was these automakers didn’t launch enough new products to encourage the overall sales. Others believed that the competitiveness of these traditional luxury brands had been dwarfed by some fast localized new luxury brands, including Volvo and Infiniti.