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Auto sales plunges 18% in Europe

13 March 2009 13:17 (UTC +04:00)

Baku. Nijat Mustafayev â€“ APA-Economics. European car sales plummeted 18.3 per cent in February with a dramatic fall in new auto registrations in Central and Eastern Europe leading the plunge, figures released Friday showed. The European Automobile Manufacturers Association (ACEA) said that new car registrations in Europe fell last month to 968,159 cars from 1.19 million in the same month last year.
With Central and Eastern Europe’s economy and financial markets hvaing taken a pounding this year as the global recession has gained strength new car registrations in the region tumbled by 30.3 per cent.
Car sales collapsed in Iceland, which has emerged as one of the worst hit by the worldwide crisis, with new auto registrations cascading down by 91.2 per cent year on year in February.
However, Germany bucked the downward trend thanks to new incentives that led to car buyers storming showrooms across Europe’s biggest car market.
Germany posted a 21.5-per-cent jump as car buyers cashed in on a special bonus scheme for scrapping older cars and replacing them with newer, more environmentally minded, models.
The February decline in total European new car registrations represented the 10th consecutive fall in the monthly figures and came amid a deepening crisis in the global car business.
"Two months into the year, the European market was down 23 per cent compared to January-February last year," ACEA said.
While major European carmakers posted falls of more than 20 per cent in February car sales, Europe’s biggest auto manufacturer Volkswagen AG recorded only a 10.2-per-cent drop.
However, the ACEA figures showed the world’s top luxury carmakers Germany’s BMW AG and Daimler AG as recording even more dramatic falls of about 30 per cent last month.
Germany’s statistics office said in separate data released Friday that car industry production slumped by 34.3 per cent in January, as a result helping to drag down total production in Europe’s biggest economy a dramatic 20 per cent.
European car registrations for the world largest carmaker, Japan’s Toyota fell by 18.3 per cent in February
As far as national markets were concerned, Poland also managed to report a 7.3-per-cent increase February new car registrations.
But after booming in recent years, car markets in the Baltic states reported steep falls in February with new auto registrations in Latvia and Lithuania nose diving by more than 70 per cent.
New passenger car sales were down 66.5 per cent in Romania, which is one of the European Union’s newest member states.
The biggest falls in Europe’s established car markets were also in nations that have born the brunt of the financial and economic firestorm that gained strength as 2008 came to an end.
This included Spain, where new car registrations were down 48.8 per cent and Ireland, which reported a steep 62.9-per-cent drop. Auto sales fell 21.9 per cent in Britain.