Registration Report Analysis - 2022 May Taiwan Car Market

By Jeff Lee / Mike Song 2022-06-02

Market Overview: This month the market continues the falling trend as that of Q1 and last month, the total registration drops to 30,924 units, barely shy of 30,000 units threshold. It drops by 12.3% compared with last month or 10.1% YOY, and it’s 170,525 units YTD, which drops a whopping 12.0% YOY. Although the falling trend in Q2 has slowed down a little bit compared with Q1, but just like my analysis last month, the prediction for the annual total market couldn’t be optimistic, either issues including chip shortage or cities lockdown in China that cause the supply chain of CKD operations unchained, etc., the total market in H1 will drop by at least 10% YOY. Inferring from the percentage H1 last year accounting for 49.3% of the whole year, the performance in H1 will affect 5% of the sales for the whole year (early this year most major carmakers predict there will be 450,000 units in total just like last year). In addition, the issue of supply chain caused by the two-month-long lockdown in Shanghai absolutely couldn’t be solved completely in the next 1~2 months, and the chip supply around the world must gradually return to normal status after Q3 as predicted before, then we could wait to see whether the market in H2 can be back to the same YOY. In general, I assumed that it should be modified to 425,000 units below for the prediction of the annual market for the time being.

Market share of brands:

The market share of each brand hasn’t changed a lot, except Toyota drops to 33.0% due to supply issues (it has significant 36.0% of market share YTD), CMC Mitsubishi keeps at 10.5%, and Honda, Ford, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan all are at the level of 5%~6%. Tesla’s market share increased to 5.4% due to batches of cars arrival, which is just 19 units fewer than the 5th ranked Mercedes-Benz. If we view from YTD performance, Tesla’s market share is 2.3%, which massively increased by 71.0% YOY, and it’s one of the only two growing brands, along with Hyundai among major brands (Hyundai has 12.0% of growth).

Comparison between domestic cars and imported cars (excluding heavy duty trucks):

The sales ratio of domestic cars and imported cars is 52.9% vs. 47.1% this month, and YTD ratio is 55.8% vs. 44.2%. Domestic cars have respectively weak sales, which is on the opposite side of the first 4 months performance this year. Certainly, when the supply and sales channel of Toyota fluctuates, which owns more than 1/3 of market share, it will influence the whole market. And if the supply chain issue of domestic cars couldn’t be solved in a short period, then this ratio is possibly to maintain for a few months, which means the accumulated percentage of domestic cars might drop to less than 55% when the end of Q3 comes (it’s 55.1% last years, which is the record high in recent years).

Outstanding models:

Even though many models of the long-standing Toyota underperformed comparing with last month, but Corolla Altis still has 1,180 units, Corolla Cross has 2,526 units, and RAV4 has 1,254 units. In addition, Honda CR-V has an impressive performance of 1,158 units. In the competition of light commercial vehicles pickup truck, the long-standing CMC Veryca wins by little margin, with 877 units vs. Toyota Town Ace 836 units.

BEVs market:

After the window period of delivery last month, Tesla Model has 1,655 units of registration this month, which accounts for 90% of market share in this segment, and the YOY registration is 3,954 units. Tesla has 5,621 units sold in the last year, obviously it’s easy for them to surpass this figure this year, which still depends on the supply from USA to check the final result. Other brands have fewer than 200 units sold in total, and the much-anticipated Toyota bZ4X delivered 34 units this month when went on sale, which is also limited by the supply issue. The high-priced Porsche Taycan has delivered 71 units, which is outstanding. That indicates there are infinite business opportunities in the BEVs market.