April Sales: Bad News For Detroit, Good News For Toyota City
All results of April are in, and large parts of Detroit are unhappy. Sales of GM and Ford declined, the formerly torrid gains of Chrysler slowed down a bit. Reborn Toyota posted another double-digit gain and came within touching distance of outselling Ford, while Volkswagen continues its winning streak.
GM’s April sales dropped 8 percent, and Ford’s 5 percent, generally in line with analysts’ expectations. For Chrysler, analysts had expected a gain of 16 percent, Chrysler exceeded with 20 percent.
Toyota reports a 12 percent increase, following a 15 percent gain in March. Deliveries at Volkswagen show a 27 percent gain for the group.
For the first four months, sales of General Motors show no growth. In a growing market, this signals a further erosion of GM’s slipping market share.
Total sales rose 2 percent in April, the seasonally adjusted annual rate stands at 14.4 million, same as in March, and up from 13.1 million a year earlier.
AutomakerApril 2012April 2011Pct. chng.YTD 2012YTD 2011Pct. chng.Table courtesy Automotive News [sub]
Bertel Schmitt comes back to journalism after taking a 35 year break in advertising and marketing. He ran and owned advertising agencies in Duesseldorf, Germany, and New York City. Volkswagen A.G. was Bertel's most important corporate account. Schmitt's advertising and marketing career touched many corners of the industry with a special focus on automotive products and services. Since 2004, he lives in Japan and China with his wife <a href="http://www.tomokoandbertel.com"> Tomoko </a>. Bertel Schmitt is a founding board member of the <a href="http://www.offshoresuperseries.com"> Offshore Super Series </a>, an American offshore powerboat racing organization. He is co-owner of the racing team Typhoon.
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Ford and GM sales did not actually decrease. You need to look at the daily sales rate. April 2011 had 27 sales days, and April 2012 had only 24. Usually, there is only a one day difference at most. Looking at it this way, both GM and Ford saw sales increases, and Chrysler saw a huge jump.
America's patriotic love affiar with domestics over? The cynic in me suggests yes. Can't wait to read all those posts on Autoblog wishing the domestic auto industry would implode so completely not even dust would be left. Anyways hopefully the trend doesn't continue (altough GM getting rid of some R&D folk doesn't bode well to me - even if it was just a smattering of people - couldn't they have gotten rid of some bean counters and repurposed the R&D guys into finance? As I read some comments engineers make great financial guys).