New vehicle sales in Taiwan plunged about 37 percent sequentially last month as the long Lunar New Year holiday and 228 Peace Memorial Day holiday cut short the number of working days, along with the lingering uncertainty over import tax cuts on US vehicles, market researcher U-Car said in a report yesterday.
New car sales last month totaled 22,043, slumping from 35,073 units in January and down 19.89 percent from 37,515 in February last year, U-Car data showed.
Sales of imported luxury cars, led by Mercedes-Benz, plummeted about 45 percent to 3,109 units last month from 5,663 units in the previous month, as consumers adopted a wait-and-see attitude, the data indicated.
Photo: Lin Jin-hua, Taipei Times
Taiwan finalized its US car tax policy last month upon the signing of the Taiwan-US Agreement on Reciprocal Trade, scrapping the levy on US sedans to zero from 17.5 percent and slashing the duty on US commercial vehicles to 10 percent from 21.7 percent.
The Ministry of Economic Affairs planned to implement the new duties next month at the earliest upon receiving approval from the legislature, but that plan is now up in the air after the US Supreme Court on Feb. 20 ruled that the White House’s “reciprocal” taxes on US trading partners were unlawful.
New car sales this month are expected to rebound to 36,000 units, thanks to government tax incentives, including a deduction of up to NT$100,000 in commodity tax per car when retiring old vehicles, a major car distributor projected.
The tax incentives are expected to boost the nation’s total new car sales by 6.17 percent this year to 440,000 units, compared with 414,436 units last year, Hotai Motor Co (和泰汽車) forecast in January.
Robust economic growth this year would also help stimulate car sales, Hotai said.
Hotai, which distributes Toyota, Lexus and Hino cars in Taiwan, said it aims to sell 165,000 units this year, up about 3 percent from 160,146 units last year.
Hotai sold 8,606 vehicles last month, down 17.1 percent year-on-year, with a market share of 39 percent.
Honda Taiwan Co (台灣本田) came next with sales of 1,570 units and a 7.1 market share, followed by Mercedes-Benz Taiwan Co (台灣賓士), which sold 1,343 units with a 6.1 percent share, U-Car data showed.
Nanya Technology Corp (南亞科技) yesterday said the DRAM supply crunch could extend through 2028, as the artificial intelligence (AI) boom has led the world’s major memory makers to dramatically reduce production of standard DRAM and allocate a significant portion of their capacity for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips. The most severe supply constraints would stretch to the first half of next year due to “very limited” increases in new DRAM capacity worldwide, Nanya Technology president Lee Pei-ing (李培瑛) told a news briefing. The company plans to increase monthly 12-inch wafer capacity to 20,000 in the first half of 2028 after a
Property transactions in the nation’s six special municipalities plunged last month, as a lengthy Lunar New Year holiday combined with ongoing credit tightening dampened housing market activity, data compiled by local land administration offices released on Monday showed. The six cities recorded a total of 10,480 property transfers last month, down 42.5 percent from January and marking the second-lowest monthly level on record, the data showed. “The sharp drop largely reflected seasonal factors and tighter credit conditions,” Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房屋) deputy research manager Chen Chin-ping (陳金萍) said. The nine-day Lunar New Year holiday fell in February this year, reducing
New vehicle sales in Taiwan plunged about 37 percent sequentially last month as the long Lunar New Year holiday and 228 Peace Memorial Day holiday cut short the number of working days, along with the lingering uncertainty over import tax cuts on US vehicles, market researcher U-Car said in a report yesterday. New car sales last month totaled 22,043, slumping from 35,073 units in January and down 19.89 percent from 37,515 in February last year, U-Car data showed. Sales of imported luxury cars, led by Mercedes-Benz, plummeted about 45 percent to 3,109 units last month from 5,663 units in the previous month,
RATIONING: The proposal would give the Trump administration ample leverage to negotiate investments in the US as it decides how many chips to give each country US officials are debating a new regulatory framework for exporting artificial intelligence (AI) chips and are considering requiring foreign nations to invest in US AI data centers or security guarantees as a condition for granting exports of 200,000 chips or more, according to a document seen by Reuters. The rules are not yet final and could change. They would be the first attempt to regulate the flow of AI chips to US allies and partners since US President Donald Trump’s administration said it rescinded its predecessor’s so-called AI diffusion rules. Those rules sought to keep a significant amount of AI
RSS