Jan. 23 (Bloomberg) — The slump in European heavy-truck sales slowed last month, with deliveries falling 15 percent, about half the drop in November, as Italy and the U.K. defied the economic recession and tighter credit.
Manufacturers sold 16,674 trucks weighing 16 metric tons or more in December, compared with 19,708 a year earlier, the Brussels-based European Automobile Manufacturers Association said in a statement today. Full-year deliveries fell 2.2 percent to 313,765 vehicles.
Truck sales have slowed as the global financial crisis erodes demand, causing Daimler AG, Volvo AB and MAN AG, Europe’s top three truckmakers, to cut thousands of jobs and trim production. Spain again led the heavy-truck sales plunge among the larger western European markets, with a decline of 53 percent. Italy, the U.K. and Belgium turned positive, with respective increases of 9.1 percent, 13 percent and 15 percent.
“One swallow doesn’t make a summer,” said Bjoern Voss, a Hamburg-based analyst at M.M. Warburg. “There are no signs whatsoever foretelling an improvement in truck markets in the coming six months.”
New registrations of all sizes of trucks and buses in Europe tumbled 24 percent in December, reflecting the sharpest decline in demand since 1993, the association said. Heavy-truck sales fell 18 percent in Portugal and 17 percent in Germany, the region’s largest market.
“The December fall, involving all vehicle categories, was somewhat eased” by two more working days, on average, across the region, the ACEA said.
Van Sales
Purchases of vans weighing less than 3.5 tons tumbled 26 percent in December to 135,678, while demand for vehicles exceeding 3.5 tons, including heavy trucks, fell 15 percent to 24,561.
The economy of the 16 countries sharing the euro will shrink 1.9 percent this year, the first contraction since the single currency was introduced a decade ago, the European Commission said Jan. 19, revising a November estimate for growth of 0.1 percent.
Volvo, the world’s second-largest truckmaker, said Jan. 13 it will cut 1,620 more Swedish jobs as the economic crisis hurt sales. The cuts mean the Gothenburg, Sweden-based manufacturer has eliminated about 4 percent of its global workforce in four months, having announced 2,300 dismissals in September and November.
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