Self-independent brands meeting overseas trouble

Recently, CAAM (Chinese Association of Automobile Manufacturers) released data showing that China’s total auto exporting volume increases 17.1% to 370,000 units in the previous seven months, in which passenger vehicles decrease 7.2% to 235,000 units. In the first half of year, most self-independent auto brands sold less than 2,000 units in Brazil market, such as Chery, JAC, and Lifan. While in Russian market, Lifan is the only Chinese auto company that sells more than 1,000 units in the previous seven months.

In fact, China’s auto exporting volume is going down since 2012, which was 1.06m units in 2012 and 730,000 units in 2015.Previously, CAAM predicted that the number will decrease 10% in 2016 to 640,000 units, which means that our auto exporting market will shrink nearly 40% in four years.

Experts believe that the decline is mainly resulted by the sluggish overseas market. For example, Brazil auto production volume decreases 27.8% to 482,300 units in 2016 Q1. Russian market also performs badly. Russian auto sales volume decreases 16.6% in July and 14.4% from January to July.

Apart from the above reasons, other experts believe our brands’ bad performance is also resulted by our unattractive product strengths and lacking in systematically strategic plans. It’s known that for a long time, most of our self-independent brands have no definite plans for the developments in overseas market. “Rely on low prices to obtain overseas sales volume will result in unsustainable developments, along with bad product and brand reputation.”