China may have purchased more new cars than any other country, for six years in a row, but its dealers aren’t exactly on the winning end of the deal.
The China Automobile Dealers Association is quite open about the fact that 75% of its dealers were unprofitable or barely scraping through to break even.
Zhu Kongyuan, secretary general of the China Auto Dealers Chamber of Commerce, told Bloomberg that little economic improvement and manufacturers pushing excessive inventories onto ever-growing dealer networks, the problem may worsen this year.
And everyone wants a piece of the pie – there are over 1600 exhibitors, 1179 vehicles and 30 football fields’ worth of space filled at the Beijing Motor Show.
The industry has been described as currently having a ‘Gold Rush-like atmosphere.’
Analysts point to a radical rethink of the structure of the industry in China – until that happens, they say, dealers will simply go out of business
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