China has surged past Japan to become the biggest car supplier to Australia, with imports from companies such as BYD Co. accelerating to a record high, powered by demand for electric vehicles.
Almost 36,000 passenger cars from China landed in Australia in April, according to government data released Thursday, well ahead of the 29,000 from Japan. That took the number of Chinese cars arriving in Australia in the first four months to above 100,000, a 51% increase on the same period last year.
More than 40,000 of the passenger vehicles were EVs, with imports soaring in March and April as consumers responded to an Iran war-driven jump in gasoline prices by opting for more fuel efficient cars.
EVs and hybrids made up almost half of the cars sold in Australia in May, according to earlier data from the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries, with BYD the second-largest seller, having more than doubled its market share in a year. Toyota was still the largest single brand.
BYD’s momentum is likely to continue, with the firm this month using one of its own car-carriers for the first time to ship almost 5,000 EVs to Australia. The BYD Zhengzhou docked in Melbourne a few days ago and is now stopped at a port near Sydney, according to local tracking website.
From a year earlier, car imports rebounded 25% from March, with that rise helping push the value of all imports up to a record of A$45.4 billion ($32.4 billion), the data showed.
Almost A$9 billion of that import bill was fuel, more than double the level for the same month last year.
The rising fuel bill drove and kept imports from South Korea to almost A$5 billion shipments from Singapore above A$2 billion in April. Much of that increase was just due to higher prices, with the volume of petroleum and gasoline imports declining, according to a report from Westpac Banking Corp.
Exports rose 7% from a month earlier to the highest level in three years, though the import surge compressed the goods trade surplus, with the windfall in the first four months of the year the smallest since 2018.
The “trade data for April points to a partial reversal of the weakness in commodity exports” in the first quarter, wrote Mantas Vanagas, a senior economist at Westpac.
Imports of servers and other automated data processing equipment dropped from a record in March, but were still the second highest in data dating back to 1981, as the surge in data center construction generates demand for servers and other computer equipment.
That boom was one of the few bright spots in first-quarter economic out this week, which showed growth was underpinned by private investment into data centres.
The trend is likely to continue into the current quarter and beyond, said Vanagas, who reckons there’s “a sizable pipeline of data center investment that will have a material impact on economic activity and import demand over time.”
“However, these effects are likely to emerge gradually over the medium to long term,” he added.
Bloomberg
