12:23 - 26.02.2019

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February 26, Fineko/abc.az. The world car market declined by 8.2% to 7.29 million cars and light commercial vehicles for January.

Consulting company LMC Automotive informs that the seasonally cleared annual sales level, calculated from the results of last month, amounted to 91.16 million cars.

"The world leadership in car sales is kept by China, where 2.359 million cars were sold in January (-16%). The Chinese car market shows negative trend for the seventh month in a row amid economic growth slowdown. At the same time, January’s drop in demand was the largest for this period, despite the fact that dealers offered discounts on the eve of the New Year’s celebration on the lunar calendar," the Company said.

Experts believe that the second largest global car market is the United States with an indicator of 1.126 million cars (-2.4%). Automotive markets in Western Europe continued to fall - in January by 4.4% to 1.25 million cars. At that, despite the low start of the European car market in 2019, January’s result was the second largest one since 2009. Car sales in Eastern Europe amounted to 253,500 vehicles – 8.4% less than last year.

"It should be noted that due to the increase of VAT from January 2019, the demand for new cars in Russia was shifted to the fourth quarter of last year, and therefore the Russian car market in January slowed down the growth rate to 1%. In South America the local dealers sold 248,800 cars that is by 14.7% less than in January last year. Among the world's largest car markets it is also worth mentioning Japan (403,100 cars, +2%), S Korea (133,000 cars, +1.2%) and Canada (111,200 cars, -5%)," experts say.