Tesla has
reduced the prices of its Model X and Model S vehicles sold in China,
after the Chinese authorities suspended additional tariffs on
U.S.-manufactured cars for three months starting January 1.
Tesla has cut the price of certain Model S cars in China by up to
US$15,230 (105,000 yuan), while prices for some Model X vehicles have been
reduced by up to US$9,430 (65,000 yuan), Reuters reports, quoting Tesla’s
Chinese website.
The price cuts could help lift the sales of the U.S. electric vehicle
maker in China, which were said to have plummeted in recent months over the
tariff uncertainty and frequent price changes, due to the U.S.-China trade
war.
As Washington and Beijing are trying to negotiate a trade deal amid a
three-month trade truce, China confirmed
on Friday that it would suspend for three months as of January 1 the planned
25-percent tariffs on 144 vehicles and auto parts made in the United States
and 5-percent tariffs on another 67 car items.
Tesla, which doesn’t have local Chinese production yet, was among the
first U.S. automakers to raise prices in China, due to the heated trade
tariff war in the summer. As a result, reports have had it that Tesla’s sales
in China plummeted
by 70 percent in October in the latest demonstration of the adverse
impact the U.S.-Chinese trade war is having on business.
China is a key market for Tesla where it plans to build a gigafactory, and
in October it only sold 211 cars there, according to data from the China
Passenger Car Association reported by
Reuters.
In an email to Barron’s, a Tesla spokesman disputed the
report of the 70-percent sales plunge, saying that the numbers obtained from
an official at the association are “wildly inaccurate” and “off by a
significant margin.”
Freeman Shen, chief executive at China’s electric vehicle maker WM Motor,
said reports that Tesla’s vehicle sales in China plunged by 70 percent
is “misleading
information” because of the opaque and not always accurate sales
numbers coming out of China. Shen told CNBC that
Chinese car sales numbers are always “kind of a mystery” because data is
collected through several channels.
But another China-based auto industry expert, Jacob George, vice
president, and general manager of the Chinese branch of U.S. marketing
intelligence company J.D. Power, said last week that the third-party data
about Tesla’s plunging sales was
accurate, as sales had suffered from frequent price changes in the latter
half of this year.
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
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