Has Honda lost the Chinese market?

Has Honda lost the Chinese market?

The reason why I ask this is because a few days ago, the famous "Observer Network" grandly launched an article. In the article titled "Honda lost the Chinese market", the whole article is full of misunderstandings and distortions, intentional or unintentional.

For example, at the beginning of the article, the sales volume of Honda in September this year was listed. Dongfeng Honda and GAC Honda sold a total of 101,000 units in China, a decrease of about 43,000 units from the previous month. Sales have declined for four consecutive months.

To be honest, the market performance of Dongfeng Honda and GAC Honda this year really surprised the industry. It is also an indisputable fact that sales have declined month-on-month for many consecutive months.

But from another point of view, from January to September this year, Honda's terminal car sales in China still reached more than 1.05 million units, and it should not be a problem to reach about 1.4 million units in 2022. If such a volume can be called "losing the market", then the only brands that can not be regarded as "losing the market" in the Chinese auto market are Toyota, Volkswagen, and GM.

What is particularly ironic is that BYD, which was used by that article to "step on one hand and hold one" to set off Honda's downturn in 2022, will sell only 730,000 vehicles in 2021. Also fits perfectly with the "lost market" description.

Like many other fields, China's auto market is also "30 years of Hedong and 30 years of Hexi". Ford and Hyundai used to sell one million a year, and although they are still trying to return to the mainstream, their sales are still far from their peaks; Zotye, dubbed the "tape measure department" by netizens, once sold more than 300,000 vehicles a year, but now it's almost zero. ... In 2022, BYD is indeed the light of domestic products. With the rapid development of new energy vehicles, it has achieved a surge in sales. However, with BYD's sales volume to pull the pedal, the arbitrarily claiming that Honda, which is still an important opponent, has "lost the market", is a bit too underestimating its opponent for its own brand.

With the rise of many new energy, new brands and Chinese brands, the market segments of joint venture brands have undergone tremendous changes this year. It was not the Honda family that was hit. The once dominant public will also lose its former glory in 2022. The wave of new energy is undoubtedly having an impact. From the current point of view, Honda has retained its position as a mid-size car and mainstream SUV. The Civic still ranks in the top ten in terms of sales among sedans, and the Accord and the upcoming CR-V are still an important force that cannot be ignored in their respective market segments.

In fact, the primary factor behind Honda's decline in sales in 2022 is capacity constraints, not "Chinese consumers don't like Honda." A fact is that in the past few years, both GAC Honda and Dongfeng Honda have been in a state of serious shortage of production capacity, and factories have been working overtime and overloaded production - completely opposite to the overcapacity situation of most joint venture car companies, GAC Honda has in recent years. Sales have always been chasing production capacity.

From the end of 2020, due to the impact of the epidemic and other factors, the global supply chain has begun to experience problems. Honda's production capacity in China cannot escape this impact. Zeng Qinghong, chairman of GAC Group, once revealed that due to supply chain problems, GAC Honda's sales in the first three quarters of this year were affected by at least 100,000 vehicles.

From January to September this year, the cumulative sales volume of Honda's terminal vehicles in China was 1.05 million units, a year-on-year decrease of 94.8% (that is to say, a year-on-year decrease of 5.2%). Even if you don't count the production and sales that Dongfeng Honda also lost due to supply chain problems, if GAC Honda is not affected by supply chain problems, Honda's terminal sales in China this year will be able to turn losses into profits. Can this be called "losing" the Chinese market?

In the article "Honda lost the Chinese market", the decline in Honda's sales was partly blamed on "Honda's high fuel consumption", and "the lack of power is the shortcoming of Japanese cars." An example is: BYD's super hybrid released last year, the thermal efficiency of the Xiaoyun 1.5L engine reached 43.04%, and the fuel consumption per 100 kilometers in the state of power loss was 3.8L. According to the official website of Honda China, the fuel consumption of the Honda Civic Hybrid is 4.39-4.51L per 100 kilometers.

First, sales in China's auto market are not determined solely by fuel consumption. Chinese consumers are not yet realistic, or so poor. Taking the “2021 average fuel consumption of the passenger car industry” published by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology as a reference, among the car companies with zero fuel consumption in 2021, there are not only Tesla, Wei Xiaoli, but also Lifan and Brilliance. In this way, it has been bankrupt and reorganized, and it is not a popular brand at all.

The fuel consumption of Dongfeng Honda and GAC Honda is about 6L per 100 kilometers, which is still in the leading level among mainstream car companies, at least not higher than that of FAW-Volkswagen and Geely Automobile, which sell well. And with higher fuel consumption than Honda, there are Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, and BMW. Have they all "lost the Chinese market" because of "high fuel consumption"? Obviously, this claim is a joke.

Second, Honda's "high fuel consumption" is a false proposition. If you want to forcibly compare with BYD, which has announced the discontinuation of fuel vehicles, Honda's corporate average fuel consumption will definitely be higher. But this does not mean that Honda has become lagging behind in terms of energy consumption of internal combustion engines and hybrid technology. In fact, Honda remains the industry leader in these areas. Laughing at Honda's energy consumption level, who gave the author of that article such blind courage?

For example, the DM-i technology that BYD boasted this year stands on the shoulders of Honda. In terms of power split DHT, Japan still leads the world. Regardless of Toyota's THS genre, the series-parallel method represented by Honda iMMD, currently 80% of domestic companies' DHTs use similar solutions, and BYD's DM-i is no exception. In other words, without Honda using iMMD to bypass Toyota's technical barriers, the domestic DHT blowout this year is simply rootless water - from Atkinson cycle engines to permanent magnet synchronous motors, the technical structures of the two are similar. a lot of.

It is true that Honda really lacks electric vehicles in the Chinese market. The electric model e:N series launched this year is said to be an "oil-to-electric" model, and it is not optimistic when it is launched. Soon after the listing, some 4S stores gave a substantial discount of 20,000 yuan. Even so, sales have been dismal.

But Honda is by no means without a trump card. Starting from 2024, the new electric medium and large SUV Prologue jointly developed with General Motors and Honda's pure electric models based on the Honda e:Architecture framework will gradually land. Today, I relied on the gun to say that Honda is worthless. In the future, when Honda counterattacks, it will inevitably be slapped in the face. Such cases are not unique. There are many people who laughed at the Volkswagen ID. series in the past few years, but now the sales of ID. eloquently prove that the glory of Volkswagen is still there.

As for the previous article saying that Honda is "poor in power" as a Japanese car, it is a bigger joke. In front of NSX, which independent brand dares to say that it has good motivation?

This is the interior of the current Civic

Even more ironic is that this article also said that the Civic interior is poor. And as proof, here are photos of the interior of the 2021 Civic from two years ago. The fact is that starting from the 2022 model, the Civic has been replaced with a larger floating screen, and it is by no means the interior that is all "plastic texture" as claimed in this article.

At the end of the article, "intelligence" is regarded as the biggest lifeline for Honda's future development. However, the author also mentioned that Honda has carried out in-depth cooperation with Sony in the field of intelligence. Self-owned brands can rely on suppliers to solve voice recognition and autonomous driving. Could it be that Sony, as a consumer electronics and sensor giant, will be powerless to fight back? With the help of Sony's technical strength to complete the intelligent layout, Honda's future should not be underestimated.

Honda is by no means ignorant of the Chinese market, and it is gathering strength to fight back. When China's own brands are fortunate to have bright sales in 2022, they should think about how to continue to enhance their internal strength and consolidate their leading advantages, rather than blindfolding their own eyes, only seeing their own advantages and ignoring the bright spots of their opponents - Arrogant, be careful to lose miserably in the future!