Toyota Nigeria boss, Ade-Ojo lists 3 reasons hampering car imports since this year
Contrary to permutations in government quarters that the ban on land border imports of vehicles will drive traffic at the seaports, the reverse has become the case.
Managing Director of Toyota Nigeria Limited, Mr. Kunle Ade-Ojo, who gave the statistics said only 350 new vehicles were imported by Nigerian auto firms in the first quarter of this year, which shows a drop of about 90 per cent over 3,500 recorded in the same period last year.
According to him, three factors hampering the business include high duty on imported cars, shortage of foreign exchange and economic recession which has degraded consumers’ purchasing powers for new vehicles.
According to him, total retail sale of new vehicles for the first quarter of 2017 stood at 2,000 units compared to 5,500 units sold last year.
Continuing, Ade-Ojo noted that the total retail market plunged by about 42 per cent from 32,000 units in 2015 to 18,000 in 2016.
But in further explanation, he disclosed that cmmercial vehicles sold more last year at 70 per cent than passenger cars, which recorded 30 per cent of the total sales.
Ade-Ojo averred that “The scarcity of forex affected business last year and that affected importation. Also, there was the devaluation of the naira. Whereas in the first quarter of the year, the United States dollar was just about N200, by the end of the year, it had doubled. So, prices of vehicles also doubled in the space of one year and a lot of businesses could not afford to pay for the increase given that they were also struggling to survive”.
