It proved to be a dreadful April for Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) in Germany as both the Fiat and Alfa Romeo brands lost a quarter of their sales year-on-year, running sharply the opposite way of a market that was comfortably in positive territory.
In total 314,055 new passenger cars were sold in Germany last month which was up 8% year-on-year and gave Europe’s biggest automobile market a timely boost to keep it running in the black ink for the year-to-date as, after a positive start to the year in January and February, it went negative on 2017 during March, a costly trend as this is the biggest selling month of the year.
FCA couldn’t match the overall market's performance and went the other way. The Fiat brand's sales sunk by 24.6% to 7,967 units to give it a 2.5% share of the market for the month while the Alfa Romeo division slumped 26.1% to 451 units and that added up to a paltry 0.1% share of the market for the month.
In fact, Alfa Romeo and Fiat were the second and third worst performing brands in Germany last month in year-on-year terms, behind only Land Rover, which fell by 44.9%.
After the first four months of the year sales of new passenger cars in Germany stands at 1,192,666 units which equates to a rise of 5% on the same period last year.
The Fiat brand is down 8% to 28,701 units for the year-to-date which adds up to a 2.4% share of all sales while Alfa Romeo's performance is almost flat (-0.3%) after selling 1,933 units over the first four months and FCA's 'sports' brand has attained a 0.2% share of the market for the first third of the year.
Finally, for FCA, the Jeep brand was up 2.7% to 1,316 units during April to provide the Italo-American carmaker with its only positive news for the month just gone while for the year-to-date the offroad vehicle focused division is on 5,156 sales and up 10.9%.
