Growth in Romania's market for new commercial vehicles among EU's healthiest

Registration of new commercial vehicles is up in Romania, against a backdrop of European decline, with Europe's five big vehicle markets, France, UK, Germany, Italy and Spain all seeing reductions in the registration of new commercial vehicles in the first quarter of 2012 against Q1 2011.

In Romania almost 3,000 new commercial vehicles were registered in Q1 2012, up 18.1 percent from the 2,529 recorded in the same quarter last year. March 2012 versus March 2011 showed a 2.3 percent fall. Breaking up Romania's results by vehicle class shows wide variations. Registrations of the largest class, light commercial vehicles, or vans, rose by 19 percent on the same quarter in 2011, medium heavy vehicles were down 3.3 percent and heavy commercial vehicles up 1,6 percent. Meanwhile, new registrations of buses and coaches rocketed up over 600 percent. However, it must be remembered that this concerns a very small market – 184 registrations in Q1 2012 against just 26 in the same quarter of 2011. Germany recorded the smallest fall of the five, down 1 percent on the same quarter last year to some 75,600 new commercial vehicles. France, the biggest market, saw a 5.8 percent quarter on quarter reduction to 116,000 new vehicles registered, the UK a slightly bigger fall of 8.9 percent, while Spain and Italy suffered the biggest drops, of 22.6 and 36.1 percent respectively. With around 25,000 new commercial vehicles registered during the first quarter of 2012, Spain's market, the smallest of the big five, has shrunk to almost the same volume as the Netherlands, where registrations were up 3.7 percent to 23,476. Romania's results are in line with other regional EU countries. New commercial vehicle registrations went up by 5.5 percent in the new EU member states, contrasting with a 9.6 percent fall for the EU27. Romania's increase was among the best of the bunch, along with Latvia and Bulgaria, which also recorded increases of around 20 percent in new commercial vehicles from the first quarter in 2011. Liam Lever, liam@romania-insider.com