CHINA'S monthly auto sales surged to the second-highest level this year in November, setting the world's largest auto market on the road to meeting record-high annual sales of 19 million units, the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers said yesterday.
Deliveries of passenger cars and commercial vehicles in China rose 8.2% from a year earlier to 1.79 million units last month. The sales gained 5.3% in October, and together the two months confirmed the market's turnaround from the 1.8% drop in September when consumers shunned Japanese cars amid the Diaoyu Islands dispute.
By last month, the combined auto sales in the country this year had reached 17.5 million units, with the accumulative growth getting back to 4 percent after the deceleration in September. Deliveries of passenger cars rose 7.1% to more than 14 million units.
Japanese carmakers saw their passenger car sales recover in November. Their sales surged 72.2% on a monthly basis to 170,200 cars, which helped their market share gain 4.04 percentage points.
Though their sales were still a 36.1% drop on an annual basis, they marked a revival from October and September when anti Japan protests in China almost halved their sales.
Foreign carmakers filled up the vacuum, especially American brands whose sales surged more than 30% last month from a year earlier, followed by German, South Korean and French brands growing more than 20% each.
Sales by China's brands grew 11.9% year on year last month to 638,600 units, taking up 43.7 percent of the country's passenger car sales
