Used car sales zoom forward

China's used car transactions reached 359.5 billion yuan ($58.59 billion) in 2012, up 22.6 percent year-on-year with a total of 7.94 million units sold, data from the Mini­stry of Commerce (MOFCOM) showed Thursday.

Sales of new cars in China have topped the world for three consecutive years, with around 25 percent of the world's auto production going to China in 2012, data showed.

"Widespread car ownership and the strong sales growth in China's automobile industry have laid a solid foundation for the development of a used car market," Yu Yuan­bo, vice-chair of the China Automobile Dealers Association, told the Global Times Thursday on the sidelines of a MOFCOM press conference.

Yu said the size of China's used car market at present is more than 10 times its size 10 years ago, with an annual growth rate of around 29 percent, citing the association's calculations based on major used car markets in China.

The eastern provinces reported 18.5 percent year-on-year growth in used car sales, slightly higher than 17.8 percent in the western provinces, Yao Jian, spokesperson for MOFCOM, said at the press conference.

Yu noted that the used car market in China is very likely to maintain double-digit growth that could even top 20 percent in the next few years.

Beijing saw its used car sales top 700,000 units in 2012, higher than the city's new car sales of 580,000 units. Beijing is the first and only city in China to report more used car sales than new car sales, which, according to Yu, is a sign of a mature auto market.

Based on a survey of 975 used car transaction markets in China, the 32,000 used car dealerships in those markets have created jobs for some 175,000 people, according to MOFCOM.

Despite the fast development, experts and officials said that the sector still lags far behind developed countries and is also troubled by honesty issues, with some dealers concealing accurate information from buyers.

There are around 40 million used cars sold in the US each year, according to Deng Li, an official at MOFCOM.

Deng noted that used car sales in developed economies are usually one to three times the sales of the new car market, while used car sales in China are only around 40 percent of the new car market.

MOFCOM said that the top 100 used car markets accounted for nearly half of the used car market's total sales in 2012, with 3.95 million units sold. Experts said that the market will grow increasingly concentrated, and new transaction methods such as auctions are also expected to gain popularity in the future.

The vehicle dismantling and recycling industry is also growing in China, with 1.15 million scrapped cars retrieved in 2012, up 0.5 percent year-on-year, according to the ministry.