Motor industry analysts are sticking to their guns that 2018 new vehicle sales will exceed those of 2017, despite sales lagging at the halfway point. June new vehicle sales, released by the Department of Trade and Industry on Monday, improved by 3% from 45,332 to 46,678 compared to the corresponding 2017 month. Though car sales grew 4.4%, from 28,625 to 29,886, it was not enough to drag first-half 2018 numbers out of the red. Ghana Msibi, sales and marketing head at WesBank, said he was still confident the market would accelerate in the second half of the year. June’s “encouraging” sales showed the market was moving in the right direction. The National Association of Automobile Manufacturers of SA (Naamsa) also expected full-year growth but with the rider of “a challenging economic environment going forward”.
Naamsa and Msibi both said new vehicle sales traditionally increased in the second half of the year, even though that impetus may have been slightly undermined by March’s...
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