Slovak car registrations increased in 2009
January 16, 2010
Sometimes the news from Slovakia is so much against the trend of its neighbours that you wonder what's going on. Not many people gave Slovakia much of a chance of success when it joined the EU and similarly when Slovakia joined the Euro there were many people who prophesied an economic disaster. And yet now we can read that car registrations in Slovakia in 2009 increased by nearly 7% over 2008 while amongst new EU members as a whole there was a near 30% drop. Across the EU as a whole registrations increased by 1.3%; in the so-called western EU, sales increased by a miserly 0.5%, a statistic which is skewed by a 23% rise in Germany where the government stepped in to offer significant help to car manufacturers. And perhaps it's the government incentives rather than rising prosperity which created the rising demand; if that's the case then the forecast for 2010 can't be so rosy as most governments are ending, or curbing, those incentives.Spare a thought for the Baltic States. In Latvia registrations fell in December 2009 numbered only 199, a nearly 80% fall from December 2008. Only 199 new cars registered, that's a sobering thought. Lithuania and Estonia did not fare well, recording falls of over 40%.
„There's lies, damned lies and statistics.“ So investors should be careful not to make the wrong decisions from car registration statistics.
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