Geely Cuts Annual Vehicle Sales Target 30% to 1.41 Million on Sluggish China Market
Yang Haiyan
DATE:  Jan 08 2020
/ SOURCE:  yicai
Geely Cuts Annual Vehicle Sales Target 30% to 1.41 Million on Sluggish China Market Geely Cuts Annual Vehicle Sales Target 30% to 1.41 Million on Sluggish China Market

(Yicai Global) Jan. 7 -- Geely Automobile Holdings, the Chinese company that owns Volvo and the maker of London's iconic black cabs, has slashed its sales target for this year by almost a third because of the prolonged slump in China's auto market.

Geely cut the target to 1.41 million vehicles, the Hangzhou-based firm said yesterday. A strategic plan the automaker laid out in 2016 set an expectation for 2 million vehicles being sold by 2020.

The firm's wholesale sales reached 130,000 units in December, according to a research report by Guosheng Securities, but retail sales amounted to 170,000, indicating an improvement in dealer inventories. Coupled with Geely's continued roll-out of new models this year, the lower target is relatively conservative, the report added.

China's auto market, the world's biggest, has been in the doldrums for the past two years due to market saturation and cuts to government subsidies for new energy vehicles. The market is expected to contract by about 2 percent this year, according to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers.

By continuously expanding its product line and rapidly upgrading models, Geely almost doubled the 760,000 vehicles it sold in 2016 to 1.5 million in 2018. It managed to meet last year's target of 1.36 million after a 39.3 percent year-on-year spike in December sales to 130,000. But the full-year figure was still 9 percent lower than for 2018.

Geely has said it will debut six new models this year. Two of them belong to Lynk, its joint venture with Swedish luxury brand Volvo Cars, while another is from Geometry, Geely's newly launched high-end all-electric vehicle.

Editors: Dou Shicong, Peter Thomas

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Keywords:   Greely