Cars & Autos | Wednesday 13 December, 2017 12:56 am |

Audi continues the upturn of the past few months with its year-end spurt. In November, the premium brand delivered around 160,000 automobiles to customers worldwide, up 4.5 percent year-on-year. The company once again saw a clear increase in North America (+13.6%) and in China (+6.5%), in Europe  ( 0.1%) sales came in on a par with the November figure for 2016. Cumulative global deliveries at the end of the month totaled around 1,699,550, 0.8 percent below the reference figure from 2016.

 

“Despite the current challenges in some European markets we have achieved the highest November sales worldwide ever,” says Bram Schot, Board Member for Sales and Marketing at AUDI AG. “We aim to confirm the positive trend in December and are confident of slightly exceeding 2016 sales in the year as a whole.” Growth was boosted in November in particular with the sustained high demand for the Audi Q2 and the models in the A5 family.

 

Among Audi’s three core sales regions, North America performed the most dynamically in the past month. 23,650 automobiles sold represent growth of 13.6 percent in the region. The United States reported a double-digit increase (12.1% to 19,195 automobiles), making November the 83rd record-breaking month in a row for Audi. Meanwhile, the SUV trend continued. Demand for Q models increased by 23.2 percent compared to November 2016. The A5 family was the largest growth lever. In November, more than 1,100 U.S. customers took delivery of the A5 Sportback alone, which only went on sale in the U.S. market from the second generation. Likewise in Canada, Audi achieved substantial double-digit growth in November (+19.3% to 2,928 automobiles).

 

In China, the A4 accounted for the largest share of Audi’s November growth. Across all models, deliveries increased by 6.5 percent to 56,208 premium automobiles. As such, China was once again the single market with the highest absolute growth for Audi in November. Since the agreement at the end of May with its local partners on future collaboration, the brand also achieved a new record-breaking sales figure in China in every month. This reduced the cumulative decline in sales to 2.1 percent in the course of the past month – with 528,706 deliveries from January through November.

 

Europe was dominated over the past few weeks by the market launch of the new A8. The flagship of the Four Rings went on sale in dealerships in the second half of November. Among the European markets, Italy (+4.2% to 5,806 automobiles) and Spain (+1.6% to 4,242 automobiles) once again performed positively. In particular, however, the downturn in the market in the UK had a negative effect on business in Europe: 12,173 sold Audi models represent a year-on-year decline of 6.1 percent. Nonetheless, deliveries from the Ingolstadt-based automaker once again held up significantly better than the overall market. In France too (‑1.4% to 5,473 automobiles), sales were down year-on-year. In the German market, sales remained virtually on a par with 2016 (‑0.6% to 21,529 automobiles). In total, around 797,150 customers collected keys for their new Audi in Europe since the start of the year, 0.4 percent more than in the same period last year.