After the seized up and locked down national vehicle markets of March and April, a rebound occurred in May as lockdowns across Europe were eased and dealerships re-opened. The numbers are unsurprisingly well down on a year ago, but they nevertheless exceeded analyst expectations.
For the three national markets of France, Italy and Spain, combined light vehicle sales fell sales by 55% on last year to 268,000 in May, which compares with a 75% drop in March and a staggering 93% decline in April.
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Individually France’s market performed the best, with a 47.3% year-on-year fall for light vehicle sales, with Italy falling just under 53% and Spain by 70.6%. Of the three markets Spain performed closest to GlobalData’s expectations for May with 3,000 more units sold than forecast. France’s sales nearly doubled expectations, while Italy registered 40,000 more.
“It’s early days, but May’s performance could see GlobalData’s forecast for the market revised upwards,” said Calum MacRae, Automotive Analyst at GlobalData. “The reporting markets accounted for 36.5% of European light vehicle sales in 2019, so it would be brave to make too many inferences from the sample, but it’s a broadly encouraging set of results. Currently, we forecast a 25.1% fall in European light vehicle sales in 2020 to 15.4 million.”
MacRae added that manufacturers and retailers are still looking for indications on where demand will go as countries relax population restrictions but also face the economic fallout from the COVID-19 crisis.
“Much depends on how markets settle down in the coming weeks as the initial wave of pent-up demand is met and we start to get a feel for how economies are really performing in the wake of this unprecedented crisis,” he said. “There are a lot of variables in the mix in terms of how consumers are feeling, their post-Covid transport preferences and national economic performances. We are clearly a long way off pre-crisis norms, but the automotive market is at least getting up off the floor.”
