Blog

Daxue Consulting regularly conduct research on luxury car market in China. Get in touch with our consultants for more information.

Luxury car means the D-class car with a price between 500,000 and 2000,000 yuan.While super luxury car refer to those over 2 million.Recent years, proportion of luxury car sales in China is increasing rapidly and reached 7.7% in 2012. In some developed markets in Europe , the luxury car market share is more than 10%, while it reaches up to 30% in some countries such as Germany. It shows that Chinese luxury car market has large space to grow.

From Jan.to Aug.2013, most of the luxury brands’ performance in China is better than its global market.Except for Benz,the other brands such as BMW, Audi, Mercedes, Volvo, JLR and Porsche, all have a Eiger sales growth in China. Global sales of BMW and Audi have exceeded one million:with a growth of 9.2% and 9.2% respectively,while the two brands’ sales in China have grown by about 20%.

In May 2013，when it comes to the structure of brand awareness, German brands including Benz,BMW, VW and Audi won the first four places.Among them, Benz stands first with a ratio of 24.3% and becomes the only brand exceeding 20%.Followed are BMW（17.4%),VW（14.2%) and Audi（13.7%）. Also,Rolls-Boyce’s attention proportion is over ten percent, 13.0%.

Next, we will focus on the of luxury cars in China.In the past half year,top three of sales volume are still German brands:Audi,BMW and Benz.Sales volume of Audi is 228,139 followed by BMW’s 170,700。However,although Benz comes the third with the amount of 98,914,it’s only nearly half of BMW .

Super luxury cars consumption concentrate in the coastal areas.Regarding the market share of each region, the provinces with sales of over 10% is Beijing, Shanghai and Zhejiang. Meanwhile, sales of Guangdong, Jiangsu, Sichuan and other provinces accounts for over 5% in China.In other places, super luxury market share is more than 2%, including Inner Mongolia, Shandong, Hebei, Liaoning and Fujian. Thus it can be seen that most of the luxury users distribute in the coastal cities and some resource provinces (such as Inner Mongolia).

How about the consumer situation in China’s luxury car market?In 2012,the average age of luxury car consumers was 36.And 30 to 40-year-old consumers accounted for 2/3. By 2020, as predicted, consumers of 28-48 may account for over 80% in the luxury cars field.54.6% of the customers pay close attention to brand loyalty,and 37.4% care about the design style.43.2% choose power and technology as their most concerned factor while 26.9% focus on the history of  luxury brand.Chinese luxury car users are divided into five groups,namely Brand Backbone Type,Cutting-edge Technology Type,Business Leaders Type,Sagacity Type and mage Supreme Type.Brand Backbone Type(mainly male,30-39) pay attention on origin and property.Cutting-edge Technology Type are willing to try the advanced features and technology while Business Leaders Type are mainly successful business owners or senior executive,they focus on social identity and comfort.Next,Sagacity Type has a high percentage of women who care about luxurious figure and cost performance most.The last is the Image Supreme Type between 30-39 ,their emphasis is on the representing of personal identity and image.

Business consulting firm suggests that Chinese super-luxury car market sales growth benefited from China’s increasing number of high net worth individuals. From 2006 to 2011 , the number of this population has tripled, and reached 1 million in 2012 . Nearly 63,000 of them are ultra-high net worth individuals (with net asset over 100 million yuan ), which is one of the most promising super-luxury car buyers. Meanwhile, started from 2009, buying super-luxury cars has been included in the planning of Chinese billionaires.As expected, with steady economic recovery, the number of high net worth individuals will be further enhanced. Meanwhile, because the super-luxury car market is largely unaffected by the government procurement, and the client’s brand awareness, loyalty and continued spending power are strong,it is expected in 2017 ,China will become the world’s largest super-luxury car market.

Written for Daxue Consulting Market Analysis China

See also more about Myanmar market