New car sales improve drastically

New car sales in the Southern African Customs Union (SACU) during October was at 36 826 units, according to the National Association of Automobile Manufacturers in South Africa (NAAMSA).
This shows an improvement of 6076 new cars or an increase of 19.8% compared to the 30,750 new cars sold during October 2010.
According to NAAMSA the continued strength of the new car market in October, was due to a number of factors including improvement in the financial position of consumers on the back of relatively low interest rates, improvement of vehicle affordability in real terms and the positive influence of aggressive marketing and sales incentive programmes during the month.
In addition, consumers would have been encouraged to bring forward planned purchases in light of expectations of future price increases as a result of recent Rand depreciation.
Sales of industry new light commercial vehicles, bakkies and minibuses had recorded a creditable performance and at 12 994 units for October, reflected an increase of 1 754 units or a gain of 15.6% compared to the 11 240 units sold in the corresponding month last year. For the first 10 months of 2011, new light commercial vehicle sales were ahead by 11.4% compared to the corresponding period last year.
Sales of vehicles in the medium and heavy truck segments of the industry at 829 units and 1 689 units, respectively, had recorded an increase of 199 units or 31.6%, in the case of medium commercial vehicles, and a gain of 280 units or 19.9%, in the case of heavy trucks and buses, compared to the corresponding month last year. Total year to date sales of medium, heavy commercials and buses remained 24.4% ahead of the corresponding ten months of last year.