China’s passenger car sales slowed last month as tax breaks for -energy-efficient cars lapsed and cities began tightening curbs on vehicle use to help combat traffic congestion and smog, according to a report yesterday.
The Shanghai-based China Passenger Car Association reported that sales of passenger cars fell 10.3 percent last month from the month before to 965,238. On an annual basis, sales rose 12.6 percent.
Chinese bought 13.7 million passenger vehicles last year, up by a third from 2009. But that robust growth is forecast to cool this year due to the expiration of tax incentives for some vehicle purchases and a renewed effort by cities to bring traffic under control.
“Of course the withdrawal of financial incentives would impact any country’s auto market and sales did continue to grow in January, but toward the end of the month there was a sharp cooling in sales,” the Passenger Car Association report said.
It said sales this month were bound to decline because of the usual slump following the Lunar New Year holiday, which was longer than usual.
Head of the association Rao Da took aim at what he called a policy of “encouraging car purchases, while restricting car use.”
The explosive growth in Chinese car ownership has nurtured the rise of the domestic auto industry, but left major cities like Beijing and Shanghai jammed with traffic and choking on smog.
China’s capital has decreed it will limit new vehicle registrations to 240,000 this year — just over a third of those registered last year — to try to ease massive traffic jams that have turned Beijing’s streets into virtual parking lots.
News that Shanghai would more strictly enforce existing restrictions on vehicles with out-of-town license plates, often bought by city residents to avoid paying exorbitant fees in monthly auctions, boosted the average price for a plate to 44,000 yuan (US$6,666) last month, local reports said.
As of last month the government ended sales tax rebates and subsidies for rural buyers, which initially fueled huge growth in sales of minivans in the countryside after they took effect in 2009.
That is expected to dampen demand in coming months, but most auto manufacturers are banking on solid growth in the country’s vast rural areas and inland cities, where most families do not yet own cars and those that do are keen to trade up.
Foreign manufacturers are still counting on double-digit growth in China and other emerging markets to compensate for sluggish sales in their home markets.
General Motors Co, which for the first time in its 102-year history sold more cars and trucks in China last year than it did in the US, reported sales in China rose 22.3 percent from a year earlier last month to 268,071.
Ford Motor Co’s sales climbed 20 percent, to 53,340 vehicles.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts