Auto sales continue their slide
For automakers, the end of a miserable 2008 couldn’t have come soon enough. Unfortunately for them, 2009 is likely to be worse.
Final U.S. auto sales tallies were released Monday, and automakers finished the year with a total of 13.2 million cars and light trucks sold, down from 16.1 million in 2007.
Among individual carmakers, Chrysler had the worst year, with sales down 30%, while General Motors was off 22.6% and Ford declined 20.1%. Even Japan’s Toyota and Honda, long held up as exemplars, took it in the gut, with sales off 15.4% and 7.9%, respectively, on these shores. All told, it was the worst year for sales since 1992 -- when there were 70 million fewer Americans.
“I’m glad this year is over,” said Mark LaNeve, North American head of sales and marketing at GM, during a Monday conference call.
According to industry analysts and even GM itself, 2008’s decline of nearly 3 million units -- an 18% decrease -- could be followed by another slide of 2 million to 3 million units this year as the recession continues.
That’s a grim forecast for an industry that has already cut deeply to reduce costs while trying nearly every trick in the book to draw consumers to dealership lots. And it raises real questions about the viability of an industry already on the rocks.
Last month Toyota said it expected to post its first operating loss in 70 years, ratcheting up the panic rampant in the industry.
“It’s hard to be optimistic about 2009,” said Mark Oline of Fitch Ratings. His firm projects U.S. sales will fall 11% more this year, to about 11.7 million vehicles, a level he and others say won’t sustain an industry that grew fat in a market accustomed to annual sales topping 16 million.
Oline noted that the category of vehicles least affected by the current downturn, small cars, also happens to have the lowest profit margins, a troubling prospect for an industry that has long made most of its profits selling pickups and sport utility vehicles. “There’s no hiding for anybody right now,” Oline said.
At the close of 2008, every major automaker save one, Subaru, showed a sales decline for the year. The Ford F-Series pickups maintained their spot as the top-selling vehicle in the country, despite a 25% sales drop compared with 2007.
A year ago, such dire straits would have been hard to predict. For the first few months of 2008, sales continued pretty much apace with a year earlier. It wasn’t until spring, when soaring gas prices devastated the market for trucks and SUVs, that sales soured.
Then credit markets froze and consumer confidence dried up. Even hybrids, the hottest category of car the first six months of the year, were nailed to dealership floors by Labor Day.
By year-end, GM and Chrysler had received emergency loans from the government, Ford was hanging on by a thread and imports like Nissan were facing declines in monthly sales exceeding 30%. Even plummeting gas prices, down more than half from summer highs, have done little to spark consumer interest.
Now, Chrysler has all its plants on temporary furlough, GM is idling 20 plants for most of this month and Toyota has put plans to build its Prius hybrid in Mississippi on indefinite hold.
Dennis Virag, president of Automotive Consulting Group, predicts sales of 11.5 million vehicles this year and says there’s little reason to think the situation will change soon. Until consumers are willing to make large discretionary purchases -- a decision contingent on a stabilized housing market and a decline in unemployment -- sales are likely to remain down.
That, in turn, will crush the balance sheets of already weakened companies.
“There’s a lot of panic on Main Street right now,” he said. “I think we’re going to see a lot of heartburn within the carmakers and a fair number of bankruptcies among the automotive suppliers.”
He said that the $13.4 billion lent in recent weeks to Chrysler and GM won’t be nearly enough for the companies, and that Ford could be forced to hit up Washington too, unless there’s a radical turnaround in the economy.
On Monday, executives at the carmakers placed their hopes on Washington and in particular the incoming Obama administration, which has pledged to deploy a huge economic stimulus package designed to halt the recession and get consumers spending again.
“The existence of a stimulus package will be a key factor supporting a recovery” for the industry, said Emily Kolinski Morris, Ford’s senior U.S. economist.
Toyota executives, too, said they were placing their hopes on the new president but were less optimistic about what lies ahead. “We have no illusions about the coming year,” said Jim Lentz, president of the company’s U.S. sales unit. “It may get worse before it gets better.”
For many, the light at the end of the tunnel is 2010, when nearly everyone predicts a sales increase.
According to Jesse Toprak, sales analyst at Edmunds.com, it will take years of economic improvement to get sales levels up to where they were in the middle of this decade -- about 17 million units. In the meantime, he expects hundreds, if not thousands, of dealers to close, job losses at the automakers to mount and brands to disappear.
“It’s going to be hard to survive,” Toprak said.
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