SHANGHAI: Skoda Auto AS, the Czech mass-market brand owned by Volkswagen AG, is counting on new models and dealership facelifts to turn around sales in China this year and help its parent company become the world’s biggest carmaker.
The manufacturer expects its new Rapid Spaceback compact car, next-generation Octavia sedan and a new version of the Yeti sport utility vehicle to lift sales more than 10 per cent by year-end, Skoda China president Andreas Hafemann said in an interview in Beijing on Monday.
“We did a lot of homework regarding the brand and also the vehicles,” Hafemann said. “With the products, it’s the expansion, it’s going into segments which we were not positioned in the past.”
Reaching its sales target would lift Skoda out of a slump in China, where it was one of only two mass-market foreign brands — Suzuki Motor Corp is the other — to see a decline last year in deliveries in the world’s largest auto market, according to researcher IHS Automotive. Nationwide, consumers bought 16 per cent more passenger vehicles than a year earlier.
Skoda sold 227,000 units in China last year, 3.7 per cent fewer than a year earlier. Deliveries have increased 8.2 per cent in the first five months of this year, compared with an 11 per cent increase in the passenger-vehicle market. Bloomberg