China will dominate vehicle sales growth
26/03/2015
A Paris-based senior analyst at IHS, Ronan Noizet, said at the Future of Automotive Leather conference in Bordeaux in March that his company calculates global sales to have been around 83 million units in 2014 but predicts that this figure will be 98 million by 2020.
Mr Noizet said China will dominate this growth, accounting for 7 million of the extra 15 million vehicle sales in 2020.
He also predicted that sales of premium vehicles, which account for 10% of the total market at the moment, will grow even more quickly in the period to 2020 than the industry overall, with IHS putting the rate at 32%. This is important for the leather industry because premium cars tend to use more leather in their interiors than mainstream cars.
The big four German OEMs that dominate the premium segment at the moment, Mercedes, Audi, BMW and Porsche, will still be the dominant players in 2020, he concluded, with around a combined 60% market share. The OEM he pointed to that is most likely to become what he called “a true premium brand” over this timeframe is Italian OEM Alfa Romeo.
Share this story:
