Year 2017 has been the good year for Japanese automobile market. Total sales volume of total production vehicles in Japan and imported vehicles was 5,231,466 units, 5% increase from 4,975,288 units in the previous year, recovering to the 5 million units scale. The increase and decrease of the sales volume are differ by each manufacturer. Let's check through the ranking of sales volume for each passenger car manufacturer for the year 2017.
Rank Brand Rate of increase / decrease Total units
- 1st Subaru + 13.5% 176,737 units
- 2nd Nissan + 10.6% 591,000 units
- 3rd Daihatsu + 7.5% 630,856 units
- 4th Suzuki + 6.90% 665,871 units
- 5th Mitsubishi + 6.88% 91,621 units
- 6th Mazda + 4.1% 209,689 units
- 7th Toyota + 3.1% 1,587,062 units
- 8th Honda + 2.5% 724,834 units
- 9th LEXUS - 12.6% 45,605 units
Subaru XV, a compact family car which allows you to travel off-road and snow road
Nissan LEAF. A main item model from Nissan in their strategy to develop in eco car market
Suzuki is increasing aggressively with the new model, Rush, XBEE which attract attention of public
Mazda presence with the advance class SUV
Lexus's highest class sedan LS which was fully remodeled during last autumn
Subaru and Nissan increased by two digits in percentage.
Last year, Subaru had achieved the highest growth in sales volume. Even though Subaru is a small-scale manufacturer with less than 1,200,000 units worldwide annually, but they are taking a premium brand strategy by focus on the specialty car model, with the higher selling price and profit per unit. That is strategy has been working well so far. Although the production volume is small, the proportion of profit of sales the highest among automobile manufacturers in the world.
Nissan at the second place has brought a positive impression by appealing their electric vehicles and automatic driving technologies to their customers. The increase of the sales volume resulted from the well sales of compact hybrid car "Note e-Power", electric car "LEAF", and the multipurpose car
Slight increase of sales of nice light cars of Toyota and Honda. Lexus to be expected doing well this year
Now, let's look at other brands. Daihatsu and Suzuki has shown the great increase of sales growth. Besides the well sales of the mini cars of Japanese minicar standards, Suzuki had a good result for the ordinary car as well. The compact SUV, "Crosby (XBEE)" which has released at the end of last year has attract high attention from customers, and is expected to have a good result this year.
Mazda has not performed well until last year autumn, but has recovered in winter. The sales in December has increased for 56.9% compare to the previous year December. Although Toyota has only a small growth rate, its sales performance is steady due to the large sales volumes.
On the other hand, Honda and the luxury brand of Toyota, Lexus are suffering with poor result. In addition to a great hit by the mini car "N BOX", Honda has also launched a family class model, "Civic". They were trying hard to improve their business, such as greatly improving compact car, "FIT", but it only resulted a slight growth. Some aggressive strategy might can be expected for next year. It was a hard year for Lexus in 2017, but Lexus has launched two new models, the high-end sedan "LS" in October and the large SUV "RX-L" with seven passengers seats in December. This year they are aiming for over 50,000 units sold.
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