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ased on sales figures released by Gaikindo, the Indonesian Automotive Association, March 2012 auto (4 W) sales increased 6.8 percent year-on-year (y-y) and 1.6 percent month-on-month (m-m) to 87,761 units. On motorcycles (2W), we observed a decline in March sales, down 13 percent y-y and 7 percent m-m to 619,678 units (exhibit 1 & 2), on numbers released by AISI, the Indonesian Motorcycle Association.

Astra maintained its strong monthly car sales in March reaching 49,663 units, up 10.1 percent y-y but down 0.8 percent m-m, mainly supported by the continued strong sales of its newly launched models Avanza and Xenia. Of the 6 biggest brands, Daihatsu experienced the highest y-y growth of 29.6 percent to 13,198 units while Nissan with its popular new model Juke came second, booking strong growth of 16.7 percent y-y to 5,998 units. Source: AISI

Honda managed to recover from the Thai flood and booked 4,686 units, up 12 percent y-y and 146 percent m-m, driven mostly by the jump in Jazz sales.

Honda’s March motorcycle sales were 325,642 units, down 3 percent y-y and 8 percent m-m while closest competitor, Yamaha, booked 246,203 units, down 23 percent y-y and 5 percent m-m.

As a result, Honda’s January-March 2012 market share was 60 percent, just lower than its 2M12 figure of 61 percent but higher than its share of 54 percent in the first three months of 2011.

Outlook: 4W on track to reach our numbers; 2W slightly trailing

Over the longer run, we believe that car sales will continue to achieve a double digit annual growth rate, consistent with many car manufacturers’ decisions to increase their production capacity in Indonesia.

In 2012, we expect most of the sales target to be will achieved in the first half of the year. We expect car sellers will strongly push sales in the next few months before the implementation of the higher down payment policy.

The other impetus will come from the launch of both the low-end Suzuki Ertiga and Nissan NV200 in second quarter 2012. We believe that new models tend to have the propensity to create new car demand, particularly for
first time buyers. These two additions will broaden the choice in the low-end multi-purpose vehicle (MPV) segment that accounts for the largest portion of Indonesian car sales.

Conversely, we note that 2W sales volumes are slightly trailing our full-year growth estimate of 8.2 million units (+2 percent y-y), compared to 2W sales for the first three months of this year of 1.9 million units (24 percent of our full-year — which is already one of the lowest among our peers), down 2.7 percent y-y and slightly lower than the first three months of last year percentage to full-year of 25 percent.

Despite continued strong March automotive sales, we maintain our NEUTRAL stance on the auto sector due to the impact of higher down payments starting from the second half of this year. Having said that, we note that in order to achieve our 4W sales target of 1 million units, the remaining 9 months of 2012 would only require average monthly sales of 83,266 vehicles, lower than March’s sales of 87,761. We advise investors to buy on dips, as we expect positive news outflows to persist in the coming months.

The writer is an analyst at PT Bahana Securities.