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Car imports in 2008 still made record despite economic difficulties
Though 2008 was considered a very difficult year for the national economy, when people had to tighten their purse strings and think carefully before making purchase decisions, the imports of cars in the year still could make a record with the import turnover of US $2.44 billion.
The import turnover of cars under the mode of complete built units (CBU) reached over US $1 billion, and the number of imported cars was 50,400 of different models.
According to the General Statistics Office (GSO), in December 2008 alone, the car import turnover reached US $57.3 million, while some 2,000 cars were brought into Vietnam. The figure represented the increase of US $13.6 million in turnover in comparison with the previous month and 500 cars in the number of imported cars.
As such, the value of imported cars in 2008 was US $1 billion higher than that of 2007. As for CBU imports, the import turnover in 2008 was nearly double that of the previous year in term of value and 22,400 cars in term of quantity.
Explaining the high imports of cars in 2008 despite the economic difficulties, analysts said that the high import tendency in 2007 continued in 2008.
As for domestic automobile manufacturers, the high sales in 2007 prompted them to set high production plans for 2008. Therefore, despite the economic difficulties, manufacturers could not stop their production plans at once. The manufacturers said that it takes some six months to implement a production plan, and it takes the same time to cancel the plan.
2008 was considered the year which witnessed most of the fluctuations in the import car market. In mid year, enterprises rushed to import as many cars as possible in anticipation of the price and tax hikes.
According to GSO, Vietnam imported 28,000 cars in the first four months of the year, or 7.5 times higher than that of the same period of the last year. In the first four months of 2008, Vietnam spent US $991 million to import cars, or 4.3 times higher than the same period 2007.
In 2007, the automobile market saw the tax rates lowered three times, from 90% to 60%, making the prices decrease sharply. However, the low tax and low prices could not make the imports increase considerably.
Therefore, a question may be raised that why the number of imported cars in 2008 increased considerably while the tax rates were raised from 60% to 83%, which made cars more expensive.
The answer is that car importers tried to import cars in large quantities at certain periods in order to avoid the anticipated tax hikes. Meanwhile, consumers also tried to buy cars at that time before the prices went up.
While the imports were very big, the sales in the last months of the year were very bad. Car dealers have complained about the bad business performance in 2008, while predicting that the automobile market will remain gloomy, at least in the first six months of the year.
TBKTVN
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