Sales of Ford in Europe went down for the fourth consecutive month during the month of July. Registration for the vehicles fell to a low of 22.3% and that translates to 97,800 units in the 19 main markets that Ford had a hold till date.
Not using the deep discount facility in order to ensure that volume of sales achieved on 2009 are retained as also the factor of expiry of the scrapping incentives, have been quoted by Ford as the reasons for this drop in sales figures and the company expects the same trend to continue for the entire 2010. High discount on new cars would only lead to lowering their residual value is what the Vice President of Ford Europe marketing department, Ivgar Sviggum, had to say about the high discounts that new cars were offering these days.
He went on to add that the heavy discounts being offered to keep competition rife would eventually harm the market and that it was a sustainable process. In countries like Germany, Italy and the UK where the program of scrapping has been done away with, the car car makers are resorting to offering discounts to the tune of 30 to 50 percent to keep the sales figures abuzz.
There was a surge in sales in the latter half of 2009 due to the government sponsored scrapping programs. This program had created an artificial demand for cars which led to equal rise in artificial sales of cars in that period. In the case of Ford the sales figure in its main 19 markets have come down 16 percent which translates to 1,178,700 units in the first seven months of 2010. There was a decrease of 6.5 percent in 2010 when compared to sales figures of 2009. The overall market drop for car sales was one percent in this entire period.
Source: 4wheelsnews
