A week after a report that Tesla’s sales in China crumbled in October and
the EV maker refuting it as ‘wildly inaccurate’, an auto industry expert said
that the third-party data about Tesla’s plunging sales is accurate, as sales
have suffered from frequent price changes in the latter half of this year.
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, Reuters reported
last week, citing data from the China Passenger Car Association. China is a
key market for Tesla where it plans to build a gigafactory, and last month it
only sold 211 cars there, according to the association’s data.
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.”
Later in the week, 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 last month 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. Related:
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Now another China-based auto industry expert, Jacob George, vice president
and general manager of J.D. Power China, the Chinese branch of U.S. marketing
intelligence company J.D. Power, told Observer that “The declining trend is obvious,
even if the absolute numbers are not exactly accurate.”
Tesla’s sales in China have suffered from the frequent price changes in
response to the Chinese tariffs on U.S.-made cars, according to George.
“Consumer sentiment on the brand probably hasn’t been affected, but
consumer willingness-to-pay is affected by price,” George told Observer,
commenting on the trend in Tesla’s sales in China. So far this week, Tesla’s stock
has jumped on the news that the U.S. and China are putting the trade war on
hold.
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
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