KARACHI, Sept 13: Consumers during July-August 2005-06 continued their chase for locally-assembled cars as sales rose to 23,530 units from 19,169 units sold in the same period last year, showing an increase of 23 per cent.

This makes clear that arrival of two- to three-year old cars has yet to click the minds of prospective buyers, and the local car makers are still receiving a large number of booking orders with delivery in three to six months.

Buyers still feel happy in procuring new cars which may entail waiting of several months after the booking date, while some of them are willing to pay huge premium to get a newly-assembled car on spot sales.

The massive increase of 23 per cent during the period under review showed that higher interest rates had failed to depress the sales of local manufactured cars, analyst Faraz Farooq at Jehangir Siddiqui Research (JSR) said.

“The reduction in import duty and increase in depreciation rates on used car imports for the current fiscal year have not hampered the local car sales,” he added.

Mohammad Sohail, research head at JSR, said that car sales were expected to touch over 150,000 units by the end of this fiscal year compared to less than 50,000 units sold during 1989 to 1999. “Imports of new and used cars are likely to range between 10,000-15,000 units in this fiscal year,” he added.

Surprisingly, the demand of cars (locally assembled and imported – new and used) has been on the rise, thus depicting the country’s positive economic indicators for the last two years.

He said that the per capita income had been inching up, besides the per capita car, which has been lowest in Pakistan as compared to other countries, was now fast catching up.

Raza Ansari, general manager marketing of Indus Motors Limited, told Dawn that the industry was expecting car sales to reach 170,000-175,000 units in the calendar year 2005 as compared to 125,000-130,000 units in 2004.

He said that the car demand was outstripping the supply.

Answering a question he said that a good number of used cars would be arriving in the country by end of this month.

He said that customers, having Rs700,000 in their hands, would now have an open choice to purchase a car as per their requirements. But they might be losers in case of second-hand cars because the dealers only promise after sales service and availability of spare parts but practically the situation is otherwise.

He said young people were fond of used cars due to their unique designs and sporty looks, otherwise locally-assembled cars still enjoyed an edge over them because of parts availability and after sales service.

He claimed that problems of late deliveries were gradually being resolved since the local assemblers had already doubled and even tripled their production capacities.

All Pakistan Motor Dealers Association chairman H.M. Shahzad said that a ship carrying 750-800 used cars was expected to arrive at the Karachi port on September 18, while another ship with another 750 units would leave from Japan on September 28 and may reach here by October 15.

Arrival of used cars would likely to change the market scenario and bring relief for the general public by bridging the demand and supply gap, he added.