After the halfway point of the year, Toyota can say loud and clear that it aims to achieve something unprecedented in its history: close the year as the best-selling car brand in Spain. Although there is still a long way to go until the end of the year, the Japanese firm has finished the first seven months of 2022 as the brand with the most registrations in our country, with a total of 43,634 unitsaccording to data from Anfacthe National Association of Automobile and Truck Manufacturers.
Never before has an Asian firm finished the year as the most sold car brand in our country. This exercise, anomalous due to the chip crisis, the war in Ukraine and high inflation, has, however, three Asian car companies in the top five of the best-selling brands. After Toyota, Volkswagen is located, with 36,738 registrations; KIAfighting head to head with the German, with a total of 36,466 vehicles delivered; hyundai (which belongs to the same group as Kia), very close too, with 36,136 units; and, closing the top five, Peugeot, with 35,807 cars. Seat, the firm that led the market in the last four years, appears in sixth placeafter having sold 34,188 vehicles.
Your bet, the hybrids
Toyota’s offer to take over the Spanish market is based, above all, on its hybrid technology, which is what most of its vehicles have (80% of their sales are hybrids or plug-in hybrids). Its best-selling models are the Corolla (a C-segment hybrid compact), which is the fourth most sold car so far in 2022, with 11,577 units; and the C-HR, a hybrid SUV of which the brand has delivered 10,988 vehicles until July. Together they account for more than half of the Japanese company’s sales in our country, which so far this year has increased its deliveries in Spain by 9.3% compared to 2021.
Between January and July of this year, Direct competitors of Toyota such as Volkswagen or Seat have decreased their deliveries by 14.9% and 31.7%, respectively. This last brand is one of the VW group firms that has seen its sales volume fall the most this year due to the chip crisis. The reason is that the German consortium, like most of the automobile industry, has prioritized the delivery of chips for its premium models and firms, which are the ones that report the most profits, displacing general brands such as Seat.
Market evolution
If everything remains the same until the end of the year, Toyota will end the leadership that Seat has exercised in the last four years and that which European brands have had in practically the entire century. Since 2000, the only non-European firm that managed to close the year as the best-seller was the American Ford, in 2008with 106,403 units delivered.
It should be noted that Ford is a brand with ties to Spain as it has a factory in Valencia. Toyota would not only be the first Asian brand to be the sales leader, but it would also be the first without production in the country.. So far this century, the firm that has won the gold medal for registrations the most was Renaulta total of nine times, highlighting the leadership it had at the beginning of the 2000s, when it touched 200,000 registrations and sales records were broken.
Today, the new car market has little to do with that of those years, since, according to manufacturers’ estimates, Spain will close 2022 with some 800,000 deliveries, which would mean a 6.9% reduction in sales compared to 2021 , a year that was already very bad (in the first half of the 2000s, the barrier of 1.5 million cars sold per year was surpassed).
The main reason for this reduction is the economic uncertainty generated by the war in Ukraine, with the general increase in prices and the disruptions that the conflict caused in the supply chains. Added to this is the still unresolved microchip crisis, which is expected to improve in the second part of this year.
It also leads the world ranking
Ahead of VW. The Japanese manufacturer is not only the brand that sells the most cars in our country, but also closed the first half of 2022 as the car company with the most registrations in the world, with a total of 5.14 million units, 6% less than in the same period of the previous year. In this way, Toyota is far ahead of Volkswagen, a group from which it took the world leadership in sales in 2020 (it also won in 2021). The German consortium has seen its sales reduced in the first half of this year by 22.2%, to 3.87 million units, which leaves more than 1.2 million sales of the Japanese group.
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