All posts by Amelia Jacobs

About Amelia Jacobs

Amelia Jacobs began her career in business following a surprisingly successful trip to China. Having visited the region as a tourist, she returned to America as an import-exporter. Today, Jacobs runs a thriving import-export company, splitting her time between Chicago and Shanghai. Contact Amelia at amelia[at]businessdistrict.com

Americans Moving To Compact Cars

Automobile Industry, , , , , , , , , , ,

Americans are beginning to wake up to the new financial reality and starting to adjust their lifestyles. We can see this in the new American automotive trend towards compact cars. In results from consumer surveys, more people are planning to buy compacts within the next 6 months. General Motors, Hyundai, Toyota, and Ford are all adding overtime shifts to their compact car productions lines.

Scott Fink, the president of the New Port Richey Hyundai dealership near Tampa Florida said, “As the Elantras come in, 9 out of 10 of them are pre-sold.” According to Fink, customers who are buying compact cars are trying to lower their debts and to improve their cash flow.

The price of a new compact starts at $16,500 and they can get between 30-40 miles per gallon. The best selling cars are the Chevrolet Cruze, the Toyota Corolla and the Hyundai Elantra.

Genral Motors Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Joel Ewanick said that “the buyers are completely different than the ones we have seen before.” They are more interested in economy. GM has sold 147,620 compacts from January to the end of July. Toyota has sold 154,324 Corolla’s in the same 7 months.

In May, Chevrolet four cylinder cars including Malibu, Equinox and Cruze comprised over half (fifty one percent) of all Chevrolet retail sales.  This is a raise of thirty six percent over last year’s May compact car retail sales.

The recession is here to stay for at least a few years and money-wise people are starting to be more conservative with their budgets, in order to keep solvent in these financially tough times.

Indian Increases: Car Sales Skyrocket

Automobile Industry, ,

There has been an increase in the amount of cars sold in India’s domestic market. Looking at figures for June 2011 as compared to June 2010, there was an addition of 2284 cars sold.  However, according to a report earlier this week by the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM), perhaps in part due to somewhat tough economic circumstances, the domestic car industry in the country only went up by a mere 1.6 percent last month.  Probably the additional raises in fuel prices didn’t help the matters as well as automobile price increases.

Motorcycle Madness

Motorcycle sales also did really well.  SIAM figures note that there was an increase of 107464 units from last June to this June.  Indeed, looking at the sales of all two-wheeler vehicles, there was an increase of 14.59 percent in the same time period.

India’s Commercial Vehicles

As reported in an article in Indiainfoline, there was also an escalation of domestic sales of busses and trucks.  For example, figures for June 2010, were 52,627 units, whereas for June 2011, they were 62,009.

So taking a look at the whole group of vehicles, sales increased 12.84 percent from June 2010, to June 2011.  Figures for last year stood at 12,07,934 and for this year 13,62,984.