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December auto sales missed estimates

By on January 6, 2014

The biggest automakers in the United States market reported December US sales that fell short of analysts’ estimates, as cold weather may have kept buyers from dealer lots at the end of the industry’s best year since 2007.

General Motors Company sales fell by 6.3 per cent last month, Toyota Motor Corporation deliveries slid by 1.7 per cent, and gains by Ford Motor Company and Chrysler Group LLC trailed analysts’ projections.

Industry wide sales in December were projected to climb by 3.8 per cent to 1.41 million, the average of nine estimates in a survey by Bloomberg News, pushing deliveries for the full year to more than 15.6 million for the first time in six years.

“The sales pace at the beginning of the month was slower than expected as a lot of places were hit by bad weather,” Michelle Krebs, an auto analyst with researcher Edmunds.com, said in an interview.

“Dealers thought sales would come in bigger than usual in that last week of the month and it turned out the weather wasn’t so great then, either.”

The results cap a year in which US automakers’ breadth of offerings drew more buyers to brands as diverse as Dodge, Chrysler Group’s value line, and GM’s Cadillac luxury marque.

The three Detroit-area automakers entered last month with a chance to gain US market share for the year, armed with what Kevin Tynan, an auto analyst for Bloomberg Industries, said is their most competitive lineups in a generation.

GM and Toyota trailed analysts’ average projections for gains of 1.5 per cent and 3.1 per cent. Ford’s car and light-truck sales rose 1.7 per cent, missing the 4.3 per cent average estimate. Chrysler deliveries rose by 5.7 per cent, extending a streak of sales gains to 45 months, while falling short of analysts’ average estimate of 8.4 per cent.

Nissan Motor Company sales rose by 11 per cent in December, less than the average analyst estimate for an increase of 13 per cent.

Honda Motor Company’s sales rose by 1.9 per cent to 135,255, the company said in a Twitter post, less than an estimated 4.1 per cent increase, the average of seven analysts’ estimates.

 

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