Foreign car makers should build up brands to tide over sales ‘winter’

Once considered a place where it’s easy to make a windfall profit, the Chinese market, where car sales lost momentum last year, has become more challenging for some overseas vehicle brands.

But analysts cautioned that overseas brands should examine their own businesses and build up their brand image to overcome the situation, instead of blaming their business slump solely to the Chinese market.

For example, Jaguar Land Rover’s owner Tata Motors has just attributed a record quarterly loss in Indian corporate history to slumping sales in the Chinese market.

Tata Motors reported a loss of about 269.6 billion rupees ($3.77 billion) in the October-December quarter, the company said.

Tata Motors’ slumping business was mostly due to lackluster sales in the Chinese market, the company noted.

In the October-December quarter, JLR sold 144,602 vehicles, down 6.4 percent on a yearly basis. Sales were down nearly 50 percent in China during the period.

Su Hui, a senior analyst at the China Automobile Dealers Association, told the Global Times on Tuesday that the major reason for JLR’s business slide in China is that its brand image is relatively weak among Chinese consumers, although overall market weakness in China also added to the difficulty.

“Compared with previous high growth rates, China’s automobile industry in 2018 was under great pressure. Foreign brands are somewhat affected, although German brands and Japanese brands did better,” Zhang Yu, managing director of Automotive Foresight (Shanghai) Co, told the Global Times on Tuesday.

Experts have also noted that luxury car brands went against the tide and reported good business performances in 2018, helping boost sales of some Western high-end car brands like BMW.