Author Archives: IJGResearch

New Vehicle Sales – January 2015

By | | ,
Comments Off on New Vehicle Sales – January 2015

Vehicle sales jan

1,716 new vehicles were sold during January, a drop of 6.3% from the December sales of 1,831, but an increase of 13.9% over January 2014. Passenger vehicle sales came in at 743, slightly below the average for 2014 of 803, nevertheless increasing modestly year on year. Commercial vehicle sales saw similar results, declining 3.5% month on month but increasing 20.3% year on year. Rolling 12 month sales once again reached record levels this month, with the year on year 12 month percentage change above 30% for the 11th consecutive month.

veh1

 

Toyota and Volkswagen continue to dominate the passenger vehicle segment with Toyota selling 274 (37%) vehicles and Volkswagen selling 146 (20%) of the 743 passenger vehicles sold. Toyota was also the market leader in light commercial vehicle sales, having the lion’s share at 52% of the market, followed by Nissan at 15% and Ford in third place with 11%. Commercial vehicle sales continue to come in higher than passenger vehicle sales as has been the long term trend.

veh2

 

The Bottom Line

The strong vehicle sales is attributed to a number of factors, namely the on-going expansive fiscal and monetary positions of the Ministry of Finance and Bank of Namibia, as well as purchase of vehicles by Government. The Ministry of Finance has allocated N$984.5m to vehicle purchases in the 2014/15 National Budget, a N$517.8m (111.0%) increase on the vehicle expenditure budget of the 2013/14 financial year. Government tenders yet to be delivered should maintain the momentum of vehicle sales through 2015. Strong economic growth and ever increasing private sector credit extension should bolster this trend in growth.

Namibia CPI – January 2015

By | | ,
Comments Off on Namibia CPI – January 2015

NCPI Jan 2015

 

Namibian annual inflation fell to 4.5 percent in January, from 4.6 percent the preceding month. On a monthly basis, weighted prices rose by 0.8 percent. The consumption categories experiencing the largest price increases over the past 12 months were alcoholic beverages and tobacco (7.5%), miscellaneous goods and services (6.6%), and food (6.5%). The drop in inflation over the period is attributed to the decline in food inflation and the drop in transport inflation, driven by lower fuel prices.

Food and non-alcoholic beverages have seen a steady decline in year on year inflation over the last seven months (down from 10.1% to 6.5%), which contrasts with alcoholic beverages and tobacco which have experienced increased year on year inflation since June last year (up to 7.5% from 6.1%). Housing, water, electricity, gas and other fuels, the largest weighting in the CPI basket, remained roughly in line with December’s year on year inflation of 3.6 percent.

NCPI 2015 Jan

 

Transport inflation continued to decline in January, to 1.5 percent, from 2.9 percent in December. The continued fall in this basket category was expected given the oil price decline. Transport inflation reached 10.7% in June last year as the oil price peaked. Since then the price of oil has fallen over 50% driving a decline of 21% in the price of fuel within Namibia thus far. We expect the fuel price to decline further over the coming months as the oil price stays depressed and this should lead to deflation in the Transport category of the NCPI basket within the next couple of months.

The steady fall in food and other beverage inflation is likely to continue for the greater part of the year as lower fuel prices impact production input costs. The lag between the drop in fuel prices and food inflation slowing tends to be between seven and eleven months and as such should start kicking in before the second half of the year. We are unlikely to see deflation in this basket category as fuel is only one of the many inputs into food and beverage production.

Of the four biggest categories of the NCPI basket only food and non-alcoholic beverages and alcoholic beverages and tobacco currently have inflation levels above the basket average. Considering that we expect food and non-alcoholic beverages inflation to slow, due to the lagged transmission mechanism between low fuel prices and food inflation slowing, and the other determining categories to stay depressed, we expect a further decline in inflation going forward for at least the first half of the year. It should be stressed that the decline in inflation is due to supply side factors and therefore should not be seen as a drop in demand from the Namibian consumer. Supply side inflation respite should benefit the consumer and support GDP growth.