New-vehicle sales in October increased for the fifth month in a row, improving 4.6% on sales in the same month last year to reach 51 037 units.
Passenger car sales carried the market in October, with all other segments in decline.
Sales numbers released by the Department of Trade and Industry show that new passenger car sales grew by 7.9% to 35 316 units.
Sales of new light commercial vehicles, bakkies and minibuses, at 13 376 units, dropped 1.7%.
October sales of new medium trucks, at 668 units, declined 3.2%.
New heavy truck and bus sales decreased 5.1% to 1 677 units.
New-vehicle exports declined 8.3% to 28 229 units.
The National Association of Automobile Manufacturers of South Africa (Naamsa) describes October’s sales gain as “encouraging”.
“The improvement was despite the continued difficult economic environment, compounded by political and economic policy uncertainty.”
Naamsa expects sales to improve by about 1.5% in 2017, compared with 2016.
The association says new-vehicle exports were negatively affected by the impact of a massive storm in Durban, which affected operations at the Durban port and at Toyota’s Durban plant.
“Hopefully, new-vehicle exports will show an improvement in the last two months of 2017 on the back of the normalisation of Durban port operations and recovery of production by Toyota Motors South Africa.”
Naamsa also notes that Porsche had, from October, declined to provide sales statistics by segment, with only a single sales number available.
This makes the German brand the fourth company to do so, following in the footsteps of BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Chinese carmaker Great Wall Motors.