China Auto Industry Monthly Recap

March 8 – Passenger car sales in China rose 22.3% year on year to 1.09 million units in February, according to the China Passenger Car Association.

March 8 – China will export more than one million vehicles annually in one or two years, according to Miao Wei, Minister of Industry and Information Technology. The nation exported around 824,000 vehicles last year, up 50% from 2010.

March 6 – Electric and hybrid vehicles are expected to make up 1% of all automobiles on the road in China by 2015, according to Ouyang Minggao, the head of a program on clean energy-powered vehicles

February 29 – China will launch a pilot program in Shanghai as well as Shaanxi and Shanxi provinces to test the use of methanol-powered vehicles, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said. The program is aimed at assessing methanol's potential as a substitute for auto fuel.

February 28 – China's government procurement of vehicles has excluded foreign brands, according to a sourcing catalog. Land Rover, Audi, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Toyota and Honda have all disappeared from the list. It is estimated that China spent $12.7 billion on government procurement of vehicles in 2010.

February 28 – The number of second-hand vehicle transactions in China rose to a record 4.33 million units valued at ¥210.88 billion in 2011, up 12.5% and 18.6% respectively from the year before, according to the China Automobile Dealers Association. Transactions of passenger cars totaled 2.35 million units valued at ¥118 billion last year.

February 14 – China's automobile capacity will be the most excessive of the BRIC nations by 2016, a KPMG report has found. Official data show that China will be able to manufacture 32.5 million vehicles per year by the end of 2015, double last year's volume.

February 10 – China produced 1.05 million passenger cars and sold 1.16 million passenger cars in January, down 24.3% and 23.8% respectively from a year earlier as the auto market of the world's second biggest economy continued to cool, figures from the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers show.

February 1 – The output of China's biggest 10 automakers will be responsible for 90% of total vehicle output by the end of 2015, up from 82.2% in 2011, according to a five-year plan released by the nation's cabinet, the State Council.

$1 = ¥6.31