(Yicai) Aug. 20 -- GAC Toyota Motor, a joint venture between Japanese auto giant Toyota Motor and China's Guangzhou Automobile Group, has reduced the monthly sales targets for its dealers by around 20 percent in a bid to keep the dealers happy and boost sales, but even meeting the new targets is difficult as demand plunges.

"The sales target for our store is now about 14 vehicles per sales person per month, a big drop from the previous target of up to 20 autos," the manager of a GAC Toyota dealership in Guangdong told Yicai. But even the new targets are hard to achieve. Since the start of the year, each sales agent has only been able to shift around eight or nine autos on average, he added.

GAC Toyota is also rolling out incentive measures to encourage dealers to sell more cars, said dealerships across the country, including in Sichuan, Shandong and Guangdong provinces.

In the first half, GAC Toyota’s sales plunged 25 percent from the same period last year to 362,100 vehicles. The drop in sales at JV carmakers such as GAC Toyota has to do with the rapid jump in demand for new energy vehicles.

Japanese automakers mainly sell fossil-fuel powered vehicles, yet sales of gasoline-powered autos in China plunged 34 percent in July from a year earlier to 742,000 units, according to data from the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers. And the market share they hold is now less than 50 percent, below that of NEVs.

Buoyant electric car sales are also driving up the market share of Chinese marques. Sales of brands made by Chinese car manufacturers climbed 10.1 percent in July year on year to 1.3 million autos, according to CAAM. They now account for 66.4 percent of all passenger vehicle sales, a widening of 9.2 percentage points from a year ago.

And between January and July, shipments of brands made by Chinese car manufacturers surged 21.6 percent from a year ago to 8.7 million units, with a market share of more than 60 percent.

Meanwhile, the poor sales of JV marques is affecting dealerships’ inventories. The inventory co-efficient for auto dealers soared 7.1 percent in July from June to 1.5 percent, higher than the normal range of between 0.8 and 1.2, according to a survey by the China Automobile Dealers Association.

Of this, the co-efficient for JV brands soared 14.8 percent to 1.6 percent. And that of Jaguar Land Rover, Beijing Hyundai Motor, and Dongfeng Nissan, all of which are JV marques, were the three highest at 2.55, 2.45 and 2.41, respectively.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Kim Taylor