Cars sales shoot up 19.5% in April

New vehicle sales jumped 19.5% in April compared with the same month last year‚ beating expectations. A Bloomberg consensus of economists had expected 2.7% growth.

Vehicle sales are normally poor in April because of the number of public holidays during the month.

The National Association of Automobile Manufacturers of SA (Naamsa) said overall new car and commercial vehicle sales for the month had benefited from the additional selling days during April compared with April last year‚ which had been affected by the Easter holidays.

"Aggregate industry sales of 50‚920 units have shown a fairly substantial increase of 19.5% or 8‚312 vehicles from the 42‚608 units sold in April last year. On a daily selling rate basis‚ new vehicle sales for April continued to reflect improved demand. As expected‚ export sales had registered another strong performance reflecting an improvement of 29.7%‚" Naamsa said.

Overall‚ out of the total detailed reported industry sales of 50‚920 vehicles‚ 45‚938 units or 90.2% represented dealer sales‚ 3.8% represented sales to the vehicle rental Industry‚ 2.1% were sales to government and 3.9% were to corporate fleets. This suggested that the demand for new cars remained strong despite prevailing conditions in South Africa's economy, which is struggling to grow.

Source: Business Day via I-Net Bridge