Germany January new-car sales rise 3.3% year on year

LONDON (ICIS)–Germany registered 218,365 new cars on its roads in January – up 3.3% year on year from January 2015, but down 11.7% sequentially from December, the country’s federal motor vehicle agency said in data released on Thursday.

With 21.6%, scandal-hit Volkswagen claimed the largest share of January’s sales – despite seeing its sales down 8.8% year on year.

Diesel fuel-powered cars accounted for 48.7% of January’s registrations, gasoline cars for 49.6%, with electric, hybrid and other alternative-powered cars accounting for the remainder, according to the data from Flensburg-based Kraftfahrt-Bundesamt.

The automotive industry is major global consumer of petrochemicals which contribute more than a third of the raw material costs of an average vehicle. ICIS tracks the movement of petrochemical raw material costs in auto production both globally and regionally with the weighted ICIS Basket of Automotive Petrochemicals (IBAP).

ICIS has launched a Global Automotive report covering the major automotive chemicals markets, and auto-industry and macroeconomic trends. For more information on the report and details on how to subscribe, please email automotive@icis.com

Click here for the VW scandal Whitepaper: The Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal has the potential to reshape the global petrochemical industry in dramatic and far-reaching ways. ICIS analyses the potential long term threats and opportunities and assesses the size of the impact.