New Holden chairman and managing director Dave Buttner has told Opel’s Russelsheim factory to pause production.
No Commodores or Equinox vehicles will be built and delivered to Australian shores until 2019, according to a report by Wheels magazine.
Following a 32.4% September 2018 sales slump over the same period last year, and the company’s year-to-date sales 27.1% (over 16,800) down on 2017, Buttner says the brand’s dealers were at risk of overstocking.
“If you don’t recognise the state of your sales and own up to it quickly you’ve got a pretty huge pipeline coming towards you,” Buttner says frankly.
“We’ve looked at the whole portfolio, looked at what our standard stock should be. It’s not rocket science.”
Only 672 Commodores were sold in September 2018, compared with the 2547 Australian-made cars sold less than a month before the Elizabeth factory closed in October last year – down 73.6%.
Year-to-date, Commodore has sold just 7295 units according to VFACTS reports, compared with the 17,194 sold by the end of September 2017 – down 57.6%.
Where the Kia Sportage has sold over 10,600 units to-date in 2018, the Honda CR-V has sold nearly 12,600 and the Subaru Forester has sold over 9700 units, Holden’s Equinox has only notched 3621 sales for 2018 until the end of September.
Buttner’s decades of experience on the ground at Toyota in Altona and Holden, as “an old [product] planner”, he says gave him the mettle to take the temporary action.
He says the “fairly unique situation” meant Commodore and Equinox SUV supply continued “to keep coming towards us.”
“It wouldn’t be something I’d like to repeat on a regular basis because from a credibility point of view you don’t build it by doing that,” Buttner adds.
According to the report, Holden dealers are apparently still trying to sell MY2017 stock in the lead-up to Christmas and the New Year.
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