EU Van Registrations Rise in December by 7.5%
Thursday 02 February 2012 Back to Blog
Despite the troubled economic climate which is the European Union van registrations were up by 7.5% for the month of December, when compared to December 2010.
France saw a 2.5% increase while the UK saw an increase of 13.4%. Not to be outdone Germany's registrations for December totalled at 16.3%. Only Spain and Italy saw negative numbers at -14.2% and 0.8% respectively.
In yearly terms 2011 saw an increase of 9.9% new vehicles registered than in 2010. France remained the largest van market with 482,823 commercial vehicles registered, while Germany had 334,822 registrations. The UK saw 306,488 new commercial vehicles which represents a growth of 17.6%.
The results largely reflect the position economically among the five countries, with both Italy and Spain currently in a worse state than the other three.
Brand new vans across the five countries totalled at 1,586,255 registrations which is a significant increase on 2010. This represents a 7% increase in sales. Once again, Italy and Spain did not fair so well, with Italian registrations of new vans seeing a decrease of -14.4% while Spanish van registrations saw a decrease of -15.7%.
Whether commercial vehicle and commercial van registrations are a good benchmark to represent the economics of a country overall is hard to tell. At the moment however it seems to be pretty much on the money.
Of course country economics are not the only driver of van registrations, legislation plays its part as well.
Time will tell if the new van market picks up in Spain and Italy.