Perodua maintains 188k sales target, unveils New Alza Advanced Version

KUALA LUMPUR: Perodua is maintaining its 188,000 sales target this year despite the challenging industry environment and has unveiled its New Alza Advanced Version as part of its product line-up to excite the market.

For the first 6 months of 2012 Perodua has sold some 93,000 units up 17% from nearly 80,000 units sold in the same period last year. This represents 31% of the estimated 303,100 total industry volume for 1H12.

“However, sales numbers from 2011 are not a true comparison as the entire automotive industry was impacted by the lack of parts from Japan due to the disasters that hit the island nation in March last year,” Perodua Managing Director, Datuk Aminar Rashid said at a media conference here.

“When compared with 95,000 units sold in 1H10– which we benchmark ourselves against - our sales are down by 2%, mainly due to the New Guidelines of Responsible Lending introduced by Bank Negara Malaysia in January this year,” he added.

On a quarter-to-quarter comparison, sales have increased by 42.6% to 48,200 units in 2Q12 against 33,800 units in 2Q11.When compared with the 2Q10, sales increase slightly by 2.1% from 47,200 units.

For the month of June, sales jumped a whopping 84.3% to 16,400 units from 8,900 units in the same month last year as vehicle stocks in June 2011 were badly depleted due to the parts shortage from Japan.

When compared with June 2010, sales only rose marginally by 0.6% from 16,300 units as Perodua works to address the impact of the New Guidelines.

“That being said, we are confident that we are able meet our sales target of 188,000 units this year,” he said.

For after sales, Aminar said Perodua’s service intake for the first 6 months of the year has risen 2% to 896,000 vehicles from 876,000 vehicles in the same period of 2011. The improvement in service intake has also increase Perodua’s service market share to 53% from 51% last year.

“This means that 53% of the 1.3 million Perodua vehicles that are currently on the roads are coming back to us to be serviced,” Aminar said.

Parts and accessories sales have jumped 15% to RM112.6 million for the first 6 months of the year from 97.6 million in the same period last year.

On the New Guidelines issue, Aminar said that Perodua has already taken pro-active measures to minimise the impact, which include educating its customers on the new guidelines and assisting them to get the proper documentation for their loans to be appraised speedily.

Perodua is also constantly communicating with the finance companies to come up with a standard documentation process to minimise the loan processing time.

He said that since the New Guidelines were introduced, the number of rejection increase to 27% in January 2012 compared with only 20% in December 2011. However, the rejection rate for June has eased to 24%.

“In this regard, I would like to thank the financial institution for their cooperation and I hope they continue to extend their cooperation for the benefit of the entire automotive eco-system,” Aminar said.

He said that as part of Perodua’s moving forward strategy, the national car maker will replace its Alza Advanced Version with the New Alza Advanced Version to further excite the market.

This latest version comes with a built-in touch screen multimedia system – which includes navigation; reverse camera; a new leather seat cover design with embroidery; PVC coil mat and an “Advanced Version” grade mark.

The New Alza Advanced variant’s multimedia system also comes with new applications such as the “Yellow Pages”; whereby users will be guided to the location of any company registered with the listing service provider.

Another notable feature in the New Alza Advanced Version is the TM WIFI Hotspot locator, which can enable customers to locate the nearest TM WIFI Hotspot as a value added proposition for the customer.

The New Alza Advanced Version variant comes in Automatic Transmission and in 3 colours – Mystical Purple, Ebony Black and Ivory White.

“We are proud to say that the on-the-road price for the New Alza Advanced Version is the same with its predecessor – which is RM69,503.50 for solid and RM70,003.50 for Metallic,” Aminar said.