Car sales standstill in Q1

More than two years of uninterrupted growth later, the Romanian car market seems to have got tired. At least this is what the statistics of the Association of Carmakers and Importers (APIA) show. The only category that boldly moves on, no matter what, is made up of imports.
Sixty cars separate the sales in Q1 this year from those in the same time last year. In other words, the Romanian market went down (yes, yes, no typo here!) 0.5% throughout January-March.  Albeit this seems impossible to happen when the economy is growing, the car market is taking an unexpected (or maybe not, at least as far as some people are concerned) step back, if considering the forecasts early this year, when analysts anticipated 16% to 23% growth for this market in 2003.
“This stagnation came as no surprise. It was only natural for this to happen, considering the change in the product line of the Automobile Dacia carmaker, which accounts for a very large share of the Romanian market,” Marius Carp, APIA executive manager feels.
Dacia gave up making SupeRNova this year, and started making the new Solenza model in March.
“Even if there had been a great deal of SupeRNovas on the market, the sales would not have been high, because the potential clients would have waited for the new model to come out,” Carp added.
The other major local producer, Daewoo saw output decline by 25% compared with last year, according to the same statistics. Under the circumstances, the national output went down by more than 23%, compared with last year, reaching 13,734 units. Whereas Dacia’s explanation is the change in the product line, Daewoo’s output decline is due to the completion of the export contracts it had last year. This also impacted on the overall exports, which dropped by more than 50%, considering Daewoo had been the top exporter over the last several years.
Imports are the only constant in the car market equation. They keep growing month by month and have come to account for more than 40% of the domestic market in Q1 this year, after having gone up by nearly 20% to 9,400 units.