China: heavy truck sales slip

The sheer numbers beggar belief: in 2014 a total of 748,000 heavy-duty trucks were sold in China, and that figure actually represents a drop of 3.3 per cent on the previous year…

According to a summary of China Heavy Truck Industry Report, 2015-2018, tabled recently by market research company ResearchInChina, the heavy truck market in the world's most populous nation is currently in decline, largely thanks to "growing economic downward pressure" putting the brakes on construction.

More recent figures are even more dire – over January to April 2015 the heavy truck market fell in China by 33.5 per cent over the previous corresponding period, with a paltry 193,300 trucks sold…

Other contributing factors are the adoption of the nation's China IV emissions standards, which have helped raise the cost of heavy trucks, both to manufacture and to buy. The related infrastructure for new trucks built to these standards is also patchy – the availability of AdBlue (or its Chinese equivalent), for example – and so the report says many operators are holding back from updating their fleets.

It's not all doom and gloom, however. The report says three major factors will help to put China's heavy truck segment back in the black: a major surge in new construction projects (around 420 of them, said to be worth a total of around $A2.2 trillion); the introduction of an energy conservation and emissions reduction program, which will phase out some older vehicles and therefore trigger new demand; and the growth of e-commerce, which is triggering a significant expansion of road freight.

China is adjusting to a "new normal", the report says, and the heavy truck market is following suit. In future the trend will swing towards a greater uptake of "high-tech, high-added-value trucks", with several major Chinese manufacturers releasing such products, like FAW Jiefang's JH6 (pictured). At present the market is driven for the most part by low-cost, low-tech trucks.

The report says Sinotruk topped China's heavy-duty market in 2014 with 120,000 units, but over January to April 2015 it had slipped to second place with 35,000 units, just behind FAW Jiefang (37,000 units).

They're difficult numbers to comprehend in comparison to the Australian market, where a grand total of 10,700 heavy-duty trucks were sold in 2014.

Click here to read the full summary of the report.