Argentina: New car sales point to economic recovery

News from the ACARA auto chamber of commerce in Argentina today is that new car sales had a record for the March month. The first quarter of 2010 has also set a new all-time record.

This is strong news on the consumer front for the country. For sure the inflationary spiral helps people unbutton their purses perhaps more quickly than they would normally, but there's no denying that people have money to spend down there. With GDP numbers also bouncing up in very much the same way as the rest of the region, reports of Argentina's economic implosion are greatly exaggerated...for a couple of years, anyway.

Charts of the day are.......

..Peru's new vehicle sales, 2008 and 2009.

Here's the 2009 to date numbers compared to the same period of last year...


...and this one shows the August 2008 vs August 2009 single month numbers.

When publishing this, the Peru car people, ADEPA, said that things are getting better. I reckon it must be that "getting better" phrase that the US homebuilders used back in early 2008. According to El Comercio,

"Despite the figures, ADEPA considers that sales continue to show a moderate recovery in relation to the first few months of this year."

I ABSOLUTELY ADORE that phrase "despite the figures". You could re-write that as "despite the truth" or perhaps "despite the plain facts staring at them in the face" because when I went to numbers skool a January-August drop of 20.96% and an August drop of 28.6% would mean that the slowdown in sales is getting worse, not better.

Peru's economic miracle: The miracle is that people believe their bullshit.

Chile's car sales

July's figures for new auto sales were just released by the Chilean car honchos ANAC, so it's a good moment to catch up on what's been happening to that sector in the country. In places where consumer stimuli on auto sales hasn't been used to any great extent (Brazil has been running a successful campaign on that score all year, way before 'cash for clunkers' was invented by Obama&Co), new auto sales are a good way to get a thumbrule idea of the way the consumer is acting in any given country. In the case of Chile, there's good news and bad. First the good, and new auto sales have been picking up as the year progresses.

ANAC originally put its estimates for 2009 at 130,000 units, but they've bumped that up to 140,000 on recent numbers (Chile's sales tend to increase month after month during the year, peaking in November)

But the bad news is the longer view. The 140,000 units forecast for 2009 sit like this compared to previous years.

And that's quite a drop, dudettes and dudes. Chile isn't rotating its new cars this year, with plenty of consumers driving their present car another few thousand miles instead of trading in. It's called a recession, something that Chile hasn't denied suffering for the last year. Evidence above.