theSwitchback

…but demand for the MINI WC50 stronger than expected.

According to figures released today by the SMMT MINIs sales and market share both fell during August 2009 compared to those of August 2008. The positive news for MINI was that despite this drop, MINI remains the ninth best selling motorcar in the UK for the year to date.

While July’s figures from the SMMT represented good news all round for MINI, with both sales and market share increasing, August, which is traditionally a quiet month in the UK for new vehicle registrations, was not so cheery.

918 new MINIs hit the road last month, down by 8.75 percent on last August’s sales figures of 1,006 new MINIs.

Overall market share fell away a little too, down to 1.37 percent of all new vehicles sold for the month. In August 2008, MINI represented 1.59 percent of new cars sold.

Year to date sales are down by 23.61 percent at 21,156 vehicles. For the same period of 2008 that figure stood at 27,694.

Unfortunately for MINI, the “mini” and “supermini” segments are leading a small scale revival currently being experienced in new car sales in the UK, largely thanks to the Government’s vehicle scrappage scheme, and the MINI is bucking this trend. New car sales in the UK rose for the second successive month in August, led by private vehicle sales.

MINI UK will surely be hopeful that sales will rebound again during September, when two new concept cars, the MINI Coupé and the as-yet unconfirmed MINI Roadster are certain to be show stealers and headline grabbers at the IAA Frankfurt Motorshow. Both new vehicles have been confirmed as heading for production in the UK at BMW Group Plant Oxford.

In more positive news official confirmation was recently given to our friends over at BigBlogg that 500 examples of the MINI John Cooper Works World Championship 50 will be produced rather than the planned 250. Apparently demand for this strictly limited (and very expensive) MINI special edition has been surprisingly strong, particularly in mainland Europe.

Tags: mini coupe, MINI JCW WC50, MINI Roadster, mini sales, mini uk, MINI WC50

This entry was posted on Friday, September 4th, 2009 at 7:54 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.