Imported cars begin to cool down

The imported car market is showing signs of decline and may not maintain the growth rate as in 2015 when the selling prices of many imported car models are adjusted upward.

Unable to maintain the growth rate as in previous months, the market for imported cars began to cool down and showed signs of decline when consumption dropped to 16% compared to the previous month.

Imported cars have cooled down

Consumption of imported cars decreased significantly in December.

According to VAMA, in December, the total market sales reached 29,397 vehicles, including 16,795 passenger cars, 11,447 commercial vehicles and 1,155 special-purpose vehicles. Notably, although the market continued to achieve high growth in December, the consumption of completely built-up (CBU) imported vehicles began to decrease. Specifically, the output of domestically assembled vehicles reached 18,783 vehicles, up 9.7% compared to the previous month. Meanwhile, the number of completely imported vehicles was 10,614 vehicles, down 16% compared to the previous month. This is a fairly deep decrease in completely imported vehicles to the Vietnamese market after many months of overwhelming growth of domestically assembled vehicles.

Thus, the total sales of the entire market up to the end of December 2015 reached 244,914 units, far exceeding the forecast of 200,000 units in 2015 and increasing by 55% compared to the same period last year. And despite the sharp decrease in December, for the whole year of 2015, the sales of imported cars still achieved a growth rate of 74% compared to the same period last year and increased significantly compared to 48% of domestically assembled cars.

According to the assessment, the Vietnamese market is considered to have potential for imported cars. Especially the value of imported cars is increasing day by day. According to the General Statistics Office, in 2015, Vietnam imported up to 6 billion USD, of which the number of imported cars reached 125,000 units and reached a value of 3 billion USD.

What will 2016 be like?

Many imported car models have increased in price in 2016.

The Vietnamese automobile market has grown strongly during 2014 - 2015 and reached a record number in 2015. In particular, the number of imported cars in the Vietnamese market has also increased strongly. Among them, luxury car brands worth tens of billions of VND are imported through unofficial channels. Currently, there is no official prediction about the Vietnamese automobile market in 2016. However, many people believe that 2016 may be the year when the domestic automobile market may not be as hot as last year and will have many fluctuations when many new policies take effect this year.

Notably, import tax on many car models has started to decrease slightly since the beginning of January. Specifically, import tax on 8 truck models will decrease by 2-4% since the beginning of 2016, including models with large engine capacity. However, according to the assessment, this preferential tax schedule will not be able to help cool down car prices in 2016 because while the preferential import tax rate is small, the increase due to the new method of calculating Special Consumption Tax will cause the price of imported cars to increase even more.

As soon as the Ministry of Finance finalized the plan for calculating special consumption tax and issued the Decree, there were many debates about the market being greatly affected when the new tax method would cause many fluctuations in imported car prices. From the end of December to the beginning of January, a series of imported luxury car brands officially adjusted their prices in the Vietnamese market. First were Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, BMW, ... Almost all Mercedes-Benz car lines (except for the domestically assembled C-class) have increased in price since 2016 with an increase of several tens to more than 1 billion VND. The car model with a record price increase of Mercedes-Benz in Vietnam is the G65 AMG when the selling price set from January 1, 2016 is 16.499 billion VND, an increase of 1.8 billion VND compared to the old price.

Along with Mercedes-Benz Vietnam, BMW also updated new prices for its car models in the Vietnamese market. Prices applied from January 1 increased from 49 million to 650 million VND for models imported to Vietnam, most of which increased by hundreds of millions of VND.

The BMW 640i Gran Coupe with the biggest increase was VND640 billion, from VND3.64 billion to VND4.29 billion. The BMW X6 xDrive30d increased from VND3.389 billion to VND3.888 billion. The BMW 118i also increased in price from VND1.299 billion to VND1.379 billion.

At the end of December, Porsche also began to adjust the prices of some car models. The highest increase among Porsche brothers belongs to the Panamera Turbo Executive when the new price of this car is now 11.74 billion VND, an increase of 2.4 billion VND compared to the previous price of 9.34 billion VND. In addition, other versions of this line also increased in price from 4.36 billion VND to 44.61 billion VND, an increase of 250 million for the lowest version.

Many opinions say that the increase in prices of imported cars in the Vietnamese market is mostly due to changes in policies. However, many importers say that the increase in prices of imported cars in the Vietnamese market is due to many different reasons, not just due to changes in the new tax calculation method. Among them, there are also changes in exchange rates.

According to Zing.vn