Figures released by JD Power Automotive Forecasting show that car sales in Western Europe fell by 9.2% in September. The firm said that the market had fallen to its lowest level in over a decade.
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The SAAR (seasonally adjusted annualised running rate) was estimated at 12.75m units a year, which compares with last year’s car market of 14.8m units.
September sales were particularly weak in the UK (down over 20% year-on-year) and Spain (-32% y-o-y).
JD Power said it had cut its base projection for West European car sales in 2009 to just 12.4m units, down by over 9% on 2008. Meanwhile, the market looks likely to fall by 7-8% in 2008 in total, the firm said.
JD Power also warned that this downturn to demand in Western Europe shows similarities to the market decline of the early 1990s and that a plausible assumption is that there will be a similar decline this time around.
While the September result for Germany showed a market down by just 1.5%, JD Power warned that more bad news looks likely in the coming months.
The scale of the UK market decline in September ‘strongly suggests that the UK will suffer large falls in demand in the coming months, and 2009’ it said.
The French market was up by over 8% in September but this apparently positive reading disappears once seasonal factors are taken into account — the selling rate only just scraped above 2m units/year. For 2009, JD Power said it expects to see a contraction in the French market of as much as 5%.
