Netcom commentedNew car retail sales were 800,018 units, up 41%；The only mainstream Japanese joint venture to achieve positive growth in FY 2023; Electrified vehicle sales totaled 284,983 units, up 36% year-over-year7%；Sales of high-end models totaled 398,075 units, up 12% year-on-year9%, accounting for 498%..
In the Chinese auto market, when the automobile industry is switching from fuel to new energy, and the joint venture car is declining, FAW Toyota's answer sheet in 2023 is too eye-catching, with a year-on-year increase in annual sales, and it is also carrying the banner of "unique" under the cover of the final word, and supporting the position of Japanese in China alone.
However, breaking through the fog of gorgeousness and revealing the truth behind it, it turned out that he had just been wearing the emperor's new clothes.
Businessmen become "wage earners" Do dealers continue to "play"?
In China's fast-changing auto market, the high-minded joint ventures of the past can no longer make money lying down.
In the era of fuel vehicles, these joint venture car companies can go sideways in China, relying on the brand value created by product strength; Today, they can continue to package themselves by constantly covering up the failed product power through the remaining brand value.
FAW Toyota told the world that they are still alive and well in China in 2023 as "the only mainstream Japanese joint venture car company to achieve positive growth". But is that really the case?
Although it is "the only mainstream Japanese joint venture with positive growth", what is hidden behind it is the decline in the real risk volume and the continuous surpassing by GAC Toyota.
According to official data, GAC Toyota, which is "half-parent" with FAW Toyota, will sell 901,025 units in retail sales in 2023, surpassing FAW Toyota for the second consecutive year.
In terms of the amount of insurance data based on the whole process of consumers completing the whole process of car purchase, GAC Toyota has surpassed FAW Toyota for three consecutive years.
According to the data of the State Administration of Financial Supervision and Administration, FAW Toyota's insurance volume data in the past five years has always been around 800,000 units, and since 2021, GAC Toyota has surpassed FAW Toyota. In 2021, GAC Toyota started with 0The 60,000 units narrowly surpassed FAW Toyota, and its lead in 2022 was as high as 1980,000 units, and in 2023, it will continue to lead by 1350,000 units.
Although the leading value of the insurance volume in 2023 has narrowed compared with 2022, this is the third consecutive year that GAC Toyota has surpassed it.
With such three consecutive defeats, it can still claim "the only positive growth", and the confidence behind this may come from FAW Toyota's continuous increase in the "pressure on the car" of dealers.
As we all know, the sales data released by traditional car companies usually has a certain amount of "moisture", and the reason is that their car sales model is generally wholesale first and then retail, in order to show excellent performance, "car pressing" has become a normal operation to create false prosperity.
In 2023, FAW Toyota's annual insurance volume will be 765,456 units, a difference of 34,562 units from the official sales volume, that is, in order to make up a brilliant annual sales figure, FAW Toyota has more than 30,000 inventory cars at dealers to be digested.
Under the "press" model, the dealer's profit is composed of the profit from the sale of the bicycle and the manufacturer's rebate. In the fiercely competitive fuel vehicle market, the profit of single car sales has been declining, and the manufacturer's rebate has become the main source of dealers' profits.
In 2023, although the total retail sales of new cars officially announced by FAW Toyota will exceed 800,000 units, only 18 units will increase. Explained by the logic of car pressing, this sales volume is more like being "artificial" through the way of "pressing".
The continuous surpassing by GAC Toyota and the continued sluggish sales have led FAW Toyota to continue to increase its "car pressing" efforts, and it has also forced dealers who are already struggling to make ends meet.
In November 2023, a letter from a dealer proposing to other dealers seeking a boycott of FAW Toyota circulated on the Internet, causing the conflict between FAW Toyota and the dealer to completely erupt.
In the proposal, the dealer was extremely angry and sharp, angrily accusing FAW Toyota of seriously violating the laws of the market in August, causing a crisis in the dealership's operation, and the distribution coefficient of the urban support fund in the second quarter was seriously out of reality, and the annual distribution did not care about the life and death of the dealer, and described the above situation as "the incompetent nature of the robber is undoubtedly revealed", and at the same time called on other dealers to jointly refuse to pay FAW Toyota, and not complete the August task, so as to require the FAW Toyota Economic Management Department of the Chinese side to immediately **.
In addition, the proposal also revealed that the personnel of the FAW Toyota factory used the inspection as an excuse to eat and drink, and could not find and solve the problem when they went to the store, but only ate and drank to collect money and sell what they thought was feasible methods, arbitrarily modified the target, car allocation, annual calculation, and dumping at a low price in the name of large customers, and a series of problems, and at the same time, it was more blunt to say that "stop your money-laundering market activities, which have no effect, and let the dealership sell falsely to achieve the goal."
Perhaps in order to stabilize the mood of dealers, or perhaps for fear of being reported by dealers for more serious corruption, FAW Toyota issued a "Letter to FAW Toyota's Dealer Partners" on November 3, 2023, announcing that it would continue to reduce production from December to February of the following year after a significant reduction in production in October and November.
It is worth noting that in disregarding the interests of dealers and blindly "pressing the car", FAW Toyota has long had a criminal record.
In 2014, FAW Toyota dealers complained to the China Automobile Dealers Association that the manufacturer's business policies and car pressing seriously infringed on the dealer's business interests, making it difficult for the dealer to make a profit.
According to FAW Toyota's official website, its business philosophy is "customer first."
First, the dealership.
Second, the manufacturer is the third". However, there are constantly such bad deeds, regardless of whether the customer is the first for the time being, "the manufacturer is the second, the dealer is the third" is undoubted.
Dealers and manufacturers, there seems to be a relationship between lips and teeth. Squeezing dealers, cheating, eating and taking buckles, and hurting front-line "combat" partners in this way is undoubtedly digging their own graves.
In the new energy era, the life of joint venture car companies is getting worse, in the case of no advantage in product power and no longer prominent brand value advantage, dealer partners are their only remaining advantage now.
The year-on-year increase in official sales is why it is difficult to hide the weakness?
By 2022, FAW Toyota will become an automobile company with annual sales of one million vehicles, more than 10 million customers, and more than 100 billion operating income. Hu Shaohang, then secretary of the party committee and general manager of Toyota Motor Sales, made such a bold statement at the 2020 Guangzhou Auto Show.
Hanging the bull's head logo with the most sold cars in the world, FAW Toyota naturally has the confidence to shout such a goal. However, at the end of 2023, FAW Toyota has failed to hit one million sales for two consecutive years.
With Toyota's global momentum still strong and its net profit doubling in the first three quarters of fiscal 2024, FAW Toyota's failure to hit one million annual sales twice is enough to prove that its momentum has turned from prosperity to decline.
First of all, after losing the advantage of the product matrix, FAW Toyota was quickly surpassed by its brothers of the same clan.
For a long time before, in the competition between North and South Toyota, FAW Toyota has always had the upper hand, because in terms of product matrix, FAW Toyota is more like Toyota's eldest son, with Rongfang, Corolla, Crown, Prado and other four global hot-selling models; GAC Toyota only has two global best-selling models, Camry and Highlander.
In 2020, after both sides adjusted their products, the models on both sides were completely aligned, and Toyota's models were all "one car and two eats" between Toyota in the north and south.
In this way, after losing the advantage of the product matrix, FAW Toyota can only weaken the reality of its weak growth by increasing pressure on dealers. GAC Toyota surpassed it the following year after the product alignment, and never gave FAW Toyota a chance to turn over.
Secondly, the A-class sedan, which accounts for the highest proportion of sales, continues to be robbed of market share by autonomous plug-in hybrid models of the same level, which is also one of the main reasons for FAW Toyota's weak situation.
In 2021, with the launch of the BYD Qin PLUS DM-i, the compact plug-in hybrid (PHEV) sedan boom has been rapidly brought up among independent brands, and the pattern of the compact car market, which has been dominated by joint venture brands all year round, has changed.
It was also from this year that FAW Toyota's annual sales of more than one-third of the main sales model Corolla stepped down from the altar. In the same period when the sales of Qin PLUS DM-i continued to grow, the sales of Corolla showed a stepwise decline.
According to the data on the number of insured vehicles, the number of Corolla insured vehicles in 2021 will drop from 360,000 to 300,000, 250,000 in 2022, and 170,000 in 2023.
In this situation, this once FAW Toyota's leading product may become the "oil bottle" of its overall sales in the next 2024 and 2025.
In addition, while gasoline vehicles have begun to decline, pure electric vehicles have not improved, which is another major reason for their weakness.
Although it is officially claimed that its electrified models sold 284,983 units, a year-on-year increase of 367%, but that's just a play on words thrown by FAW Toyota to cover up the weakness.
If you don't continue to pay attention to FAW Toyota's electric vehicle sales, you will think that the sales of its pure electric models are not low, and even rank high among the new forces.
However, judging from the data on the number of its pure electric models, the number of units insured in 2023 will only be 24,026 units of the BZ3 and 11,641 units of the BZ4. Therefore, the year-on-year growth of electrified models actually includes its pure electric vehicles and hybrid vehicles.
Toyota's EV development has not been active, which is not unrelated to the fact that its helmsman Akio Toyoda does not look down on the development trend of EVs. In such an objective context, FAW Toyota's two BEVs can reach 35,667 units, which is barely in the past, but in China's EV market, such results are almost negligible.
In addition, according to the data of the new energy vehicle marketing data research agency Jayland Road, the personal ownership rate of Toyota's BZ series is only 22%, which means that nearly eighty percent of the sales have flowed to the B-end, and in the C-end market, the BZ series belongs to the ghost-like existence.
Continuously surpassed by GAC Toyota, the collapse of the main sales model, and the serious lag in the development of pure electric vehicles, can the "only mainstream Japanese system with a year-on-year increase" really cover up the reality that it is weakening?
Write at the end
The surface is still beautiful, but the problems behind it have appeared one after another.
Is the fall of Tian Qingjiu, the former general manager of FAW Toyota Sales Company, due to corruption, a rare case or the tip of the iceberg? Does the frequent change of senior management affect the long-term development strategy of the enterprise and shake the military spirit of the dealers? The product power has not kept up with the times, do Chinese consumers still recognize Toyota's bull head mark?
After 20 years of hard work, it is now necessary to cover up the sadness of reality with dodgy packaging. If the new clothes of the FAW Toyota Emperor have been draped on his body, the results speak for themselves.
Photo: CNS, Zhuo Lu).