SEOUL, June 14 (Yonhap) — Sales of imported commercial vehicles jumped 9.8 percent last month from a year earlier as such vehicles gained a bigger market share in South Korea, a local automobile association said Thursday.
The number of newly registered imported commercial vehicles jumped to 358 units in May from 326 on growing demand here, the Korea Automobile Importers and Distributors Association (KAIDA) said in a statement.
Local demand for imported trucks, buses and vans is on the rise as those vehicles are more technologically advanced than domestically-produced models. They are viewed as being unrivaled in terms of endurance and maintenance costs, a KAIDA spokeswoman claimed by phone.
In the January-May period, the number of imported commercial cars sold in Korea climbed 8.6 percent to 1,965 units from 1,816 in the same period one year ago, it said.
The five major imported commercial car brands are MAN, Mercedes-Benz, Volvo Trucks, Scania and Iveco. The sell trucks, buses and vans, the statement said.
There are three kinds of trucks. Two of them, classified in the cargo and tractor segment, are regarded as commercial vehicles but the third one, referred to as dump, are regarded as construction equipment, KAIDA said.
KAIDA began to compile sales data of imported commercial vehicles in January last year and plans to collect sales data of dump trucks in the country later this year to offer more comprehensive sales data, it said.
Imported commercial vehicles currently account for the lion’s share of the domestic commercial car market but their exact market share is not available, the spokeswoman said.
Volvo Trucks ‘FH LNG’ model (Yonhap)
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