SHANGHAI, Dec 9 - On December 8, the China Passenger Car Associations (CPCA) disclosed that the retail sales of passenger car in broad sense reached 1.85 million units in November, down 12.5% year-on-year and up 6.2% month-on-month.

“The darkest hour of auto chip shortage in the third quarter has passed, and the original expectation was that the chip supply improvement would have prompted the production activities to last November's level. While in fact, the output grew by about 14% MoM, which still fell behind last year's level. The bottleneck of supply opacity is still in place.” Cui Dongshu, secretary-general of CPCA, believed that the shortage of resource supply will be further eased in December. At the same time, the Chinese New Year in 2022 is on February 1, 11 days earlier than last year, which will benefit the accelerated recovery of the automobile retail market in December. Hence, the December market may still shed some spotlights.

Also according to CPCA, domestic passenger car output in November was 2.23 million units, up 13.9% from a month earlier; wholesale sales were 2.15 million units, with in-plant inventories at carmakers and distributors up 80,000 units and 190,000 units respectively by the end of November MoM.

However, the joint venture brands were still affected by the "after-effects" of the chip shortage. Data shows that the domestic retail shares of independent brands reached 46.3% in November, an increase of 6.9 percentage points year-on-year. In contrast, mainstream joint venture brands retailed 780,000 units in November, down 23% year-on-year though up 1% MoM; the reading dropped by 21% compared to November, 2019.

New energy vehicles remained an important highlight of the auto market in November. Data from CPCA showed that the retail sales of new energy passenger cars reached 378,000 units in November, up 122.3% year-on-year and 19.4% on the month. In the first 11 months, the retail sales of new energy passenger vehicles reached 2.51 million units, up 178.3% over the same period last year. The domestic retail penetration rate of new energy vehicles was 20.8% in November and 13.9% from January to November, a significant increase from the penetration rate of 5.8% in 2020.

The CPCA expects that the penetration rate of new energy passenger cars will be able to exceed 20% next year. According to Ouyang Minggao, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, domestic sales of new energy vehicles are expected to be around 3.3 million units throughout 2021.