Continued growth in vehicle sales surprises
Supply chain and other challenges have strangled the growth of vehicle sales somewhat over the past months, but retail sales in December proved to be amazing.
In December 2022 vehicle sales went up 16.2% as compared to December 2021, and this caught most people by surprise.
Gary McCraw, the director of the National Automobile Dealers’ Association (NADA), said they are particularly pleased as retail channel sales made up 89.7% of these sales.
“What is amazing is that this growth was all achieved in a year in which Toyota lost about 70 000 units from its local production when disastrous floods in KwaZulu-Natal put its plant out of action for four months,” said McCraw.
“Not only did all the dealers survive, but they showed agility as they switched to selling far more imported cars than usual, benefiting from ongoing, practical support from the Toyota head office and field staff that undoubtedly made these challenging times more manageable,” he said.
This year dealers will still have to work within a similar, 2021/22 challenging environment, but they have proved resilient and innovative to sustain small but consistent growth.
Consumers though are still staggering because of severe load-shedding, interest rate, and fuel price hikes.
NADA suggests that because of these and other global factors, predicting the growth and what the market will do during 2023, will remain largely unpredictable.
Source: NADA
