With the first half of the year on the books, the leaderboard is dripping in red, but it’s two shades of red: Deep red, and pink. Let’s keep in mind that by end of June, total global industry volume was down by approximately 10%. Any OEM beating that number is doing alright. Any OEM down more than 10%, is doing something wrong.
In the pink department, 1st placed Toyota is extending its lead over wobbly Volkswagen. Pinko Hyundai has kicked the Alliance off the podium in May, and as of June, the Alliance is eating Korean dust.
In the deep red dept., Volkswagen’s June numbers (-6.3% yoy) look slightly less alarming than those of the months before, but even with max effort, it would be a while to work through a 22% backlog. Former powerhouse Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi is fading more and more in the direction of insignificance.
Can’t-help-it-dept.: Who’s the most covered and written about automaker? Tesla, by an obscene margin. Tesla’s sales in the first half? 564,000. Are we nuts, or what?
And now for the usual disclaimer: Daily Kanban ranks world’s largest automakers by sales, as reported by the automaker. We used to determine the largest automaker in the world by looking at production, because this was how the global automaker umbrella association OICA had done it in the past. OICA seems to have thrown-in the towel, and you no longer will find any recent auto manufacturer rankings on the previously authoritative OICA website, neither by production, nor by sales. Reliable production data are harder and harder to come by, forcing us to switch to sales/delivery data published by automakers. Be aware that “deliveries” can be a rather elastic term. Deliveries can be sales to end users, or cars dumped on dealer lots, or cars “delivered” to sales organizations, or combinations thereof.
Also, please note that Mitsubishi Motors does not publish global sales, only domestic sales in Japan. For that reason, we are forced to use Mitsubishi’s published global production data as a proxy. Speaking of the Alliance, their number reporting is not allied at all, and a common picture requires considerable Excel machinations. Nissan and Mitsubishi report sales and production, Renault only reports deliveries. Mitsubishi does not report global sales, Nissan does. To make the confusion complete, Nissan sometimes reports sales for the April-to-March fiscal year, and sometimes for the calendar year.
