Despite huge reductions in the price of motor vehicles, car dealerships said sales have been unexpectedly slow in recent weeks.

An assembly line at Hyundai Thanh Cong Automobile Factory
in northern Ninh Binh province. (Photo: VNA)

Price cutting deals, in some cases reductions of tens of millions of VND during recent holidays, failed to attract the expected amount of buyers.

Nissen Vietnam slashed prices by up to 70 million VND for buyers of Sunny, Navara, X-Trail and SUV Terra vehicles. They also offered deals for registration fees and offered free gifts with certain cars.

Isuzu also offered similar sale prices along with Toyota Motor Vietnam (TMV) and BMW, but again, sales slowed.

According to the latest report from the Vietnam Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (VAMA), the total sales in April were 21,021, down 35 percent compared with the previous month.

Taking into account the sales of 6,176 vehicles of Hyundai Thanh Cong and VAMA member units, the whole Vietnamese automobile market in April reached 27,197 vehicles which was still a drop of more than 29 percent month-on-month.

A VAMA representative, who wanted to remain anonymous, said that one reason for the downtrend was because of the Government’s decision to increase registration fees for pickup trucks from 2 percent to 7.2 percent applied from early last month, reducing purchasing power.

“However, the most important factor is that April is not the season of car purchases and the change of consumers' demand due to increasing traffic congestion in urban areas and the hike of fuel that all can make people gradually convert to public vehicles, helping them save money,” he said.

Insiders said that while the discount programmes were launched on various car models, the dealers increased the prices of a number of ‘hot cars’, requiring customers to buy more accessories for cars from tens of millions of VND to hundreds of millions of VND that caused a loss a number of customers.

Meanwhile, with the information that some new attractive models such as Hyundai Elantra, 2019 Hyundai Tucson, Toyota Camry 2019, Honda Brio and Subaru Forester, which have many noticeable upgrades, will be imported to Vietnam this month with prices much lower than the previous versions, many customers delayed buying cars in April and to wait for the new ones.