Difficulties are forecast from the end of 2022, making automakers no longer interested in participating in the Vietnam Motor Show 2023.

According to sources from automakers of the Vietnam Automobile Manufacturers Association (VAMA), automakers held a meeting at the beginning of 2023 and agreed not to hold the Vietnam Motor Show (VMS) this year. The exhibition may return in 2024.

“The market has been quiet since the early months due to macroeconomic impacts, weak purchasing power and uncertainty of time when it will improve. Moreover, the budget for exhibition is huge but its efficiency gained is not adequate, thus automakers agreed to postpone the 2023 exhibition,” said a representative of a German car company.

Other automakers give similar interpretion for not participating in this year’s show.

The VMS exhibition usually takes place in October yearly, which is the largest festival in the automotive industry, where manufacturers introduce and display concept cars or cars in sale, which is also the time when purchase demand for cars of customers increases gradually until the Lunar New Year. At this event, automakers often launch promotions to stimulate demand. VMS is therefore considered as a “support” for the sales of participating companies before the year ends. However, in 2023, with a not very optimistic potential on purchasing power, automakers are cautious about organizing exhibitions.

In 2023, many industry experts and automakers consider that the market may decline despite setting a sales record of more than half a million units in 2022, due to the impact of macroeconomics, high lending rates, narrowed credit room, causing car consumption to decrease from the end of 2022 to the beginning of 2023.

Since forecasted difficulty, the expense for participation is a headache issue for the automakers. Representatives of the companies said that the cost for each exhibition period is at tens of billions VND. For example, a small area of about 500 m2 has the floor rent of nearly 1 billion VND. For the rest, the cost of staging, managing and marketing for 4 days of exhibitions is usually nearly tens of billions. Depending on the area of the display floor, the message you want to convey… the amount of money spent is varied depends on automakers.

For customers, postponement of VMS can be a positive signal. A longtime sales manager said that expense of more than tens of billions VND for exhibition probably be spent on promotional activities for customers. This amount can be enough for a month of promotion with best-selling models. Concurrently, when there has no exhibition, manufacturers will have to rearrange plans of launching product for the year, thereby customers also can access to new cars earlier.

In fact, automakers in Vietnam are no longer too interested in exhibitions in the past few years. The market has grown over the years but is still small compared to many countries in the region such as Thailand and Indonesia. The essentials and importance are not in high level. Thus, automakers do not invest much in demonstrating new technologies or special products type at the exhibition.

Orders made at the show are still significant, for example, in VMS 2022, automakers sold 2,000 vehicles, the highest ever, but not “adequate” with the expense. Brand effectiveness wasn’t quite excellent either. This is also a common trend in the world when the exhibition model gradually becomes old-fashioned.

Source: vnexpress.net