BEIJING, January  12 (TMTPOST)—China’s automobile market managed to snap a three-year streak of sales decline last year, showing more signs to weather the global supply chain disruptions in the wake of Covid-19 pandemic including the chip shortage.   

Source: Visual China

The sales and outputs totaled 26.082 million vehicles and 26.275 million vehicles in 2021, rising 3.4% and 3.8% respectively from a year earlier, and recorded their first annual increases since 2017, China Association of Automobile Manufacturers (CAAM) disclosed on Wednesday. The overall sales in December had a 1.6% fall year-over-year (YoY), but sales of new energy vehicles (NEVs), a key drive for the whole industry’s sales including battery electric vehicles (BEVs), hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) and other non-fossil fuel-powered vehicles, more than doubled to an annual record of 531,000 units, according to CAAM.

Annual NEV Sales and Growth from 2013 to 2021

As one of bright points in the sector, NEV saw a penetration rate of 19.1% last month and the new energy passenger cars’ even reached higher penetration to 20.6%. There were 3.521 million NEVs sold in the year 2021 in China, nearly 1.6 times more than the previous year, and suggested a seven-year reign at the top of the world’s NEV sector with a market share of 13.4% in the country, well above 2020’s share 5.4%.

Prior to CAAM’s disclosure, another China’s industry body released the sales of passenger cars on Tuesday and reflected the same trend. The sales in December decreased 7.9% to 2.105 million units from a year ago and 20.146 million cars were sold in the whole year of 2021, representing a 4.4% YoY growth and the end of a three-year decline, according to China Passenger Car Association (CPCA).

CPCA’s data showed sales of NEV had YoY increases of 128.9% and 169.1% in last month and the year respectively, and the monthly sales of 475,000 vehicles made the annual sales increased to almost 3 million, accounting for about 30% of the yearly sales. CPCA noted Tesla China that month had a robust growth of 196.6% in sales which topped 70,000 units. Such monthly sales result made the U.S. maker’s China unit delivered more than 484,000 EVs for the year, suggesting about 52% of annual delivery for the year made in Shanghai Gigafactory. The association also expected the domestic auto market would turn into a big play ground for NEVs this year.