Anthony Fontanelle is a 35-year-old automotive buff who grew up in the Windy City. He does freelance work for an automotive magazine when he is not busy customizing cars in his shop.
Economists say we are not in a period of “negative growth.” But in Europe and the United States, the automotive industry is crippled by sales doldrums. After weak sales in November, auto sales figures look pretty bad in the said territories.
Sales of new cars plummeted 1.1 per cent in Europe in November with the largest automakers hurt the most. Sales by Volkswagen, Europe's largest automaker, dropped 7.2 per cent to 255,825 vehicles. "Consumer uncertainty fed by, amongst others, sharp rises in oil price, loss in purchasing power and regulatory changes'' has hurt demand in Europe, said Bloomberg.
Of course, General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co. also have large auto sales operations in Europe as well. That means that they will likely to exert great effort in both their home market and Europe. The two largest American automakers are now left with Latin America and Asia, especially China, as their only real growth markets.
As such, watchers say it is not shocking to know that both stocks trade near 52-week lows. The Dearborn-based automaker has very little presence in China. The Detroit-based automaker, meanwhile, is tied with Volkswagen as the biggest automaker in China, but local companies want to take some of those sales away.
Europe may have been the only real hope that American automakers could have a successful leap to recover in 2008. And it seems that the hope is vanishing…
German auto giant Volkswagen on Sunday said it had sold a record number of 3.37 million VW vehicles in the first 11 months of this year. The figure shows an increase of 8.8 percent over the same period in 2006, said the automaker. The maker of chic VW mirror added the company’s sales increased 10.3 per cent in November with 324,000 cars delivered to clients.
"After 11 months, we have sold roughly as many cars as we did in the whole of 2006," Volkswagen boss Martin Winterkorn said.
The German automaker posted strong third-quarter results in October and said it expected record full-year sales as Chinese and South American growth offset slumping turnover at home and in the U.S. The company said Sunday that VW sales had grown most in the Brazilian market with 448,000 units sold, a raise of 34.7 percent. China came second with a 28-percent hike, or about 726,000 vehicles, AFP said.
The company has forecast that total sales in all its units would reach the six-million mark this year.
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