PETALING JAYA: Perusahaan Otomobil Kedua Sdn Bhd (Perodua) recorded about 24,265 orders in the month of July despite the reinstatement of sales tax beginning on July 1 due to strong demand for its vehicles, government’s sales tax exemption initiative and Covid-19 pandemic lockdown.
The compact carmaker also reported higher year-to-date sales numbers with a 48.7% jump to 145,689 units sold between January and July 2022 compared with 97,945 units sold in the same period last year.
Perodua president and CEO Datuk Seri Zainal Abidin Ahmad said the sales increase were due to a few factors, namely strong demand for its vehicles and the government’s sales tax exemption initiative as well as the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown.
“The sales increase can be attributed to two main reasons, the first is due to the strong demand for our vehicles, especially between January and June this year as customers wanted to take advantage of the government’s sales tax exemption initiative. The second reason why the 2022 year-to-date numbers are stronger is due to the nationwide Covid-19 pandemic lockdown that happened between June and mid-August last year,” he said in a statement on Aug 4.
He remarked that the booking momentum, while not as strong as the bookings collected in the first half of 2022, was better than expected and that this is evidence that the automotive industry still have room to grow.
Moreover, he added that the all-new Perodua Alza received 39,000 bookings so far, of which 9,000 were collected in July. Earlier, he announced a 3,000 monthly sales target for the Alza.
“While the year-to-date numbers are encouraging, we are still cautious as there are still lingering issues in the automotive ecosystem last month, which include shortage of labour and residual semiconductor supply availability. As a result, our month-to-month sales were reduced by 13.3% to 18,346 units in July compared with 21,164 units registered in June this year,” he said.
Additionally, the company is working closely with the government to overcome the labour shortage by early August and it expects its production to resume in full beginning this month.
“On the semiconductor issue, we have secured enough chip supply for us to produce and register more than 247,800 units this year. However, we are still working on sustaining production growth. This means that we could not announce our new targets yet,” Zainal clarified.
“On the industry, we do believe that the total industry volume for this year would be more than 630,000 units as nearly all automotive brands accumulated massive bookings between January and June this year,” he said.
“Also, given that the government has extended the registration deadline for all vehicles booked on or before June 30, 2022 to March 31, 2023, we believe the industry can do better than a 30,000-registration increase by the end of this year,” he added.
In July, the Malaysia Automotive Association announced an increase in the total industry volume to 630,000 units from a forecast of 600,000 announced by the body in January 2022.
