Currently, Italy’s True Fleet Market is in a good shape. Following the remarkable first quarter, True Fleets once again achieved a robust double-digit growth with April’s 16.4%, also marking the fourth consecutive month of market growth. The other segments were in the black as well, with the Private Market growing by 2.2% and this was despite the strong surge of private customers to zero kilometre offers over the recent months while Special Channels were also up by 1.6% leaving the Total Market standing at 179,000 passenger car registrations, which represents a solid plus of 4.3% over April 2017.
Brand Performance
In regards to fleet’s OEM top 10 ranking, two manufacturers achieved three-digit growth figures and there was a lot of movement behind Fiat, which maintained its #1 rank. The first highlight was Volkswagen in 2nd, which managed to leapfrog Mercedes, Ford and BMW rising by super-solid 62.0% with several different models standing out, in particular the Golf, Tiguan, Polo and up!. Audi, Ford and Mercedes followed on ranks 3 to 5 with only Mercedes falling short of April 2017’s numbers.
April’s top 10 newcomer Jeep in 6th was the second highlight. Not only did the FCA group member rise notably by 119.6% mainly due to the Compass, it also achieved a new record fleet market share (4.9%) and surpassed BMW in 7th by just 2 registrations.
Despite this strong performance, the top 10’s growth star was a Japanese manufacturer. Nissan (8th) surged by 125.3% with the Qashqai taking a much bigger share of the growth pie than the small Micra, while the French brands Peugeot and Renault completed the ranking.
The SUV monopoly?
Once more, the SUV segment underlines its prolonged hype. With a buoyant increase of 58.7% over April, offroaders achieved a fleet market share of 42.4% in April, once again representing the highest market share ever in the Italian True Fleet channel. With the upward movement very likely to continue, every second company car might soon be an SUV. For comparison: the second largest fleet vehicle segment (Compact Cars) this month achieved a market share of 15.5%. Moreover, the highest share a non-SUV segment has ever reached in Dataforce’s recordings was 26.0% in March 2015 (Mini Cars).
Noteworthy is the performance of the already mentioned Jeep Compass, which already ranked 3rd in fleet’s SUV segment, a pretty good result when considering its quite recent market introduction in May 2017. But there were also some other SUVs with healthy growth rates in April: Toyota C-HR, Citroën C4 Cactus, Nissan Qashqai, Alfa Romeo Stelvio, Audi Q5 and Peugeot 3008 all managed to double their registration volume compared to April 2017.