European Union car sales fell to a 19-year low, with French companies PSA Peugeot Citroen and Renault SA and Italian competitor Fiat SpA posting the biggest drops, as a recession in countries using the euro hurt demand.
Eleven-month registrations in the 27-nation EU fell 7.6 percent to 11.3 million vehicles, the lowest figure for the period since 1993, the Brussels-based European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association, or ACEA, said today in a statement. The decline was propelled by a 10 percent plunge in November.
The 17-country euro area went into a recession in the third quarter. The European Central Bank is predicting that all the nations will post economic growth only in 2014, the year that car-industry executives also forecast an initial recovery in Europe’s auto market. German carmakers’ regional market share in November rose at the expense of their French and Italian peers, with Bayerische Motoren Werke AG beating Fiat for the month.
“There are clearly two worlds: on one side, the German carmakers and on the other, the Latin carmakers,” Florent Couvreur, a Paris-based analyst at CM-CIC Securities, said by phone. “The Latin carmakers are historically more exposed to southern European markets, which are plunging. This may go on next year.”
Including Switzerland, Norway and Iceland, European car sales in November fell 10 percent from a year earlier to 965,918 vehicles. Eleven-month sales declined 7.2 percent to 11.7 million cars. That’s the lowest figure for the region since 1994, Quynh-Nhu Huynh, the ACEA’s economics and statistics director, said in an email.
The association has predicted a full-year market contraction to about 12 million cars, the fewest cars sold in Europe since 1995 and the sharpest decline since 1993.
There’s “little reason to believe that EU volumes will grow next year, which means that the spread between EU-focused and export-oriented original-equipment manufacturers will only continue to widen,” Erich Hauser, a London-based analyst at Credit Suisse, said today in an email.
Fiat dropped as much as 6.4 percent to 3.46 euros, the steepest intraday decline since Nov. 7. Renault rose 0.2 percent to 40.29 euros in Paris, while Peugeot gained 1.5 percent to 5.28 euros, reversing a decline today of as much as 1.7 percent.
