Baku, Azerbaijan, Nov. 22
By Farhad Daneshvar – Trend:
The growing output of Iranian carmakers could be considered as an indication of continuing domination of government backed manufacturers in the country’s car market.
While domestic carmakers produced about 691,000 cars over the first seven months of the current Iranian calendar year (starting March 20), their output is expected to hit 1.5 million vehicles by the year end.
Iran Khodro and SAIPA, the Islamic Republic’s two largest state-run carmakers, gained the lion share of the country’s car market over a period of one month between Sep. 22 and Oct. 22 (seventh Iranian calendar month), accounting for 92 percent of the production.
In the meantime, the seven-month statistics suggests that the production level of Iran’s car industry has witnessed a 26-percent surge year-on-year.
All these figures would sound fantastic for Iranian producers, auto part makers and those caring about domestic production, but what about the consumers?
Taking the statistics and figures into account, it appears that a large part of Iranian consumers still tend to purchase home-made sub-standard cars that dominated the Islamic Republic’s car market over the years of crippling sanctions against Tehran.
Critics of the current situation suggest that the upward trend in production level comes due to small number of choices that Iranian buyers have in the country’s restricted car market.
In other words, this could signal that the efforts made to eliminate monopoly in the country’s car market have, so far, led to nowhere and there is still room for concern about investment risks in the Islamic Republic.