European Truck Sales Plunge 35% as Recession Deepens

European heavy-truck sales plunged 35 percent last month, more than double the drop in December, as the global recession ravaged the region’s main markets.

Manufacturers sold 20,068 trucks weighing 16 metric tons or more in January compared with 30,755 a year earlier, the Brussels-based European Automobile Manufacturers Association said in a statement today. The drop in December was 15 percent.

Spain and the U.K. led the slump among larger western European markets last month, with declines of 76 percent and 40 percent respectively. The U.K. drop was a reversal from a 13 percent increase in December. Deliveries fell 28 percent last month in Germany, where business confidence is at a 26-year low.

"Freight carriers are the primary victims of the downturn, and they can’t finance new trucks any more," said Bjoern Voss, an auto-industry analyst with M.M. Warburg in Hamburg. "We may have to get used to registrations slumping by such margins for a good while to come." Truck sales have waned as the global financial crisis erodes demand for the transportation of goods, causing Daimler AG, Volvo AB and MAN AG, Europe’s top three manufacturers, to cut thousands of jobs. Sales plunged 58 percent in the 10 eastern countries that joined the European union in 2004, with Poland, the biggest, suffering a 76 percent decline.
All Classes Decline

Commercial-vehicle manufacturers experienced "a significant drop in demand in all categories," the carmakers association, also known as the ACEA, said today. Sales were also hurt by the loss of 1.4 working days because of holiday schedules.

Gross domestic product of the 15 countries sharing the euro last year shrank by 1.5 percent in the fourth quarter from the third and by 1.2 percent from a year earlier, the biggest declines since records began in 1995, the EU’s statistics office said Feb. 13.

Profit at Daimler’s trucks division slumped 83 percent to 86 million euros ($110.7 million) in the quarter. The Stuttgart, Germany-based company, which owns the Mercedes-Benz, Fuso and Freightliner truck brands, is cutting 3,500 jobs, closing two North American factories and eliminating the Sterling division as part of a plan to save $900 million a year by 2011.

European purchases of vans weighing less than 3.5 tons tumbled 37 percent in January to 114,664 units, while demand for vehicles exceeding 3.5 tons, including heavy trucks, fell 33 percent to 27,336, according to the ACEA. Registrations of new buses and coaches declined 16 percent.

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