Holden continues to lead the New Zealand new car market after boosting its sales for the first four months of this year by 21%, compared to an overall increase in new car sales of just under 15%, writes Donn Anderson.
The Australian-made Commodore line remains the biggest winner for Holden, with its profile sharpened by the recent arrival of the two-door Monaro coupe version, soon to head to the USA as the Pontiac GTO.
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Holden took 18.7% of the Kiwi car market in April, a higher penetration than the make achieved for the first four months of the year. Second ranking Toyota, starting to enjoy useful volume with the new generation Corolla, has also improved with 17.1% while Ford, in third place, maintained the same 14.4% share.
April new car sales were up 29% on the same month last year, while commercial vehicles were ahead by 25.7% as the economy sparked into life. Fourth placed Mitsubishi (7.4%) was down on the 8.2% average for the January-April period. Honda (6.3%), too, couldn’t maintain the momentum of earlier months when it achieved 7.2%. Similar, Nissan (6.1%) ran out of puff in April after averaging 8% year-to-date.
The importance of high grade models boosted Ford sales. Sporting Tickford-enhanced versions of the big Australian-built Falcon range accounted for half of all XR Falcon volume. Once again, the Falcon was the top selling Ford, while the Belgian-built Mondeo was a medium class leader and continues to go from strength to strength.
With the exception of Nissan, all the leading makes are doing substantially better than last year, although the first four months of 2001 were down on the previous year. Mazda car sales deteriorated to 3.0% of the market for the first third of 2002 and, remarkably, the Japanese brand was out-shone by BMW (3.5%) which is posting record New Zealand volume. BMW sold 686 new cars for the four months, up a massive 58% on the same period last year.
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By GlobalDataHyundai sales are falling sales and are level-pegging with Volkswagen, each with 2.6% penetration, and separated by a mere two cars. Peugeot had 2.7% to just head off arch-rival VW, although it was beaten by the German marque for April.
Subaru (2.3%), Mercedes Benz (1.6%), Audi (1.5%) and Rover (1.1%) all improved volume for the four-month period but Suzuki (1.9%) was down.
Toyota retained leadership of the commercial vehicle sector with 21.8% penetration for the four months, compared with Holden’s 20.0%. But, with combined car and commercial figures, Holden sold 4,507 units for a 17.9% share against 4,240 and 16.8% for Toyota. Ford amassed 3,914 sales (15.5%) and the three makes between them accounted for more than 52% of the 6,235 new vehicles sold in April.
