![China car sales are doing better than US car sales?](https://repokar.com/public/files/manager/blog/0de57681903cf72079534d91431b1c43.jpeg)
Last year was a record breaker for China car sales, comparing to US car sales. Monthly sales, which first cracked the 2 million mark as recently as 2013, surged above 3 million in December. Still, pessimists were focused on what would happen in January, when the rollback of a tax discount for small-engined cars was expected to hit demand.
Sure enough, when January sales figures came out, they were up just 0.8 percent from a year earlier, compared with an average 14 percent pace of growth through 2016. Optimists' hopes were undimmed: The timing of Lunar New Year made January an unusually short sales month, and their confidence looked to have been validated when February data showed a respectable 9.2 percent growth rate for the two-month period.
The proximate reason was evidence that there may have been less to those good sales figures than meets the eye. Great Wall, the country's biggest maker of SUVs, on Thursday announced a 1 billion yuan ($145 million) discount promotion for its Haval cars. Chongqing Changan Automobile Co. had also started a "heavy" promotion campaign.