Late-November Car Sales Climb 17.5% : Autos: But analysts caution that the increase is a rebound over a very poor period last year. And even though the monthly sales pace picked up from October, sales for all of November were off 4.6% from a year ago.
Sales of domestically built cars showed signs of strengthening in the last 10 days of November, auto makers reported Wednesday, raising hopes that a long-awaited recovery might be in reach.
But sales of domestic and imported cars and trucks for the whole month maintained the snail’s pace at which they’ve crawled for the past year, and analysts cautioned that one mildly encouraging 10-day period does not a recovery make.
“Sales were decent (in late November), but what you’re talking about for the month is a 5.9-million annual rate, and that’s a recession,” said Ronald Glantz, analyst at Dean Witter Reynolds in San Francisco.
The annualized sales rate for cars produced in the United States reached 6.4 million in the late-November period, the highest it has been since late September. The rate for total industry sales for the entire month was 12.5 million, slightly above October’s woeful 12.1 million, but still among the lowest monthly rates of the year.
Dealers note that sales picked up a touch during the last week of November, but most agree that the glimmer of recovery that the industry grasped at in June and July, when the sales pace began to pick up, appears to have receded.
“I don’t like to have my name associated with negative news,” said one Los Angeles Oldsmobile dealer, “and let me tell you, the news is negative.”
Edward Sullivan, an economist with the WEFA Group in Bala-Cynwyd, Pa., estimates that the three U.S.-based auto makers have cut their first-quarter 1992 production plans by as much as 285,000 cars and trucks, indicating that they expect the sales slump to continue well into the new year.
Total vehicle sales for the month fell 4.6% from last November’s level, to about 945,000. North American-made vehicles, boosted by a 22% surge at General Motors and a 25.2% jump at Ford, rose 17.5% over the year-ago period in the last 10 days of November.
Sales of cars produced by Japanese companies in North America did not perform as well as sales of American cars in year-over-year comparisons for the late November period. Honda sales slid 33.3%, Mazda was down 3% and Nissan was up only 1.8%. However, Toyota and Mitsubishi posted respective 40.3% and 50% increases.
Glantz attributed the disparity in part to the lapse in Japanese auto advertising at the end of the month, as the companies braced for a potential backlash around the upcoming 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor.
In a departure from the mournful tone that has dominated U.S. auto executives’ comments during the past year, Robert Rewey, Ford’s vice president for sales, was downright cheerful in a statement accompanying the auto maker’s sales report:
“November vehicle sales . . . provide evidence that the U.S. economy is stronger than surveys of consumer sentiment suggest.”
But analysts said the period’s strong showing was more a reflection of last year’s weakness than an imminent recovery.
“These guys may be up 20-plus points, but a year ago the 10-day period was absolutely terrible. They’ve still got a long way to go before you can say the market is beginning to pull itself out,” Sullivan said.
