New vehicle sales continue to recover to pre-COVID levels
New vehicle sales in Namibia went up by 1.7% from 893 in February to 908 units in March, numbers released by the National Association of Automobile Manufacturers South Africa indicate.
March 2021 sales are the highest monthly sales figure since October 2019, when 976 new vehicle sales were sold.
For the first three months of this year, 2,494 new vehicles have been sold, of which 1,122 were passenger vehicles, 1,192 light commercial vehicles, and 180 medium and heavy commercial vehicles.
By comparison, the first three months of 2020 saw 2,221 new vehicles sold, which means 2021 is off to a slightly better start compared to last year. Moreover, the total sales for the current quarter were 2,494, making it the strongest quarter since the fourth quarter of 2019, when 2,567 new vehicles were sold.
IJG Research analysts noted that the recovery to pre-Covid-19 levels could indicate somewhat increased levels of consumer confidence.
“The rolling 12-month number of new vehicle sales rose for a third consecutive month to 7,885. The growth is however from a very low base and overall, 12-month cumulative sales is still down 65.2% from its peak in April 2015,” IJG said.
Volkswagen continues its strong lead in the passenger vehicle sales segment with 34.9% of the segment sales year-to-date, followed by Toyota with 25.1% of the market share. The two top brands maintained their large gap over the rest of the market with Kia and Mercedes following with 7% and 5.1% of the market, respectively, leaving the remaining 27.9% of the market to other brands.
On a year-to-date basis, Toyota remained the leader in the light commercial vehicle space with a 53.5% market share, with Nissan in second place with a 13.8% market share. Ford and Isuzu claimed 12.0% and 6.7%, respectively, of the number of light commercial vehicles sold thus far in 2021.
Hino leads the medium commercial vehicle segment with 26.1% of sales year-to-date, while Scania was number one in the heavy and extra-heavy commercial vehicle segment with 27.6% of the market share year-to-date.
