Spanish carmakers association Anfac thinks the recent steep year on year sales falls of recent months could ease from June.
Go deeper with GlobalData
Discover B2B Marketing That Performs
Combine business intelligence and editorial excellence to reach engaged professionals across 36 leading media platforms.
May sales were down 38.7% on the same month in 2008.
“The rate of decline in new car sales is lower in the first half of June, having fallen 10.5% from a year earlier, though this is still down 44.8% from the same period in 2007,” Anfac’s financial director Aranzazu Mur told Reuters.
June would be the 14th straight month of declines, though the rate of falls has been less severe since the government launched a EUR200m (US$279.1m) subsidy plan offering EUR2,000 subsidies to new car buyers funded by EUR500 from the government, EUR500 from local authorities and EUR1,000 from automakers.
The programme is additional to the government’s EUR700m Plan-Vive, which subsidises the acquisition of energy-efficient cars and replacement of old vehicles.
Mur told Reuters Anfac expects the industry to have registered 800,000 car sales in 2009, if sales due to the government subsidy package were not taken in to account, compared to 1.16m in 2008.
