The Difference Between CPCA, CAAM, Insurance and License Plate Data
There are two main automotive sales data sources in China — China Association of Automobile Manufacturers (CAAM) and China Passenger Car Association (CPCA).
CAAM — Government approved statistical organization
CAAM is an organization, which was authorized in 2002 by State Economic and Trade Commission, and National Bureau of Statistics to gather statistical data on automotive industry. CAAM publishes monthly statistics on Chinese automotive production and sales. The data comes from automotive manufacturers which report the data to CAAM.
CAAM sends out a report form to automotive manufacturers. The form is made according to the standards for industrial forms made by National Bureau of Statistics, so it is a part of official industrial data statistics. According to the principles of industrial statistics, a vehicle produced by manufacturer is recorded as sold as soon as it is sold to a dealership. Hence, CAAM’s data is wholesale and not retail data.
CPCA — non-governmental statistical organization
Another organization that publishes monthly reports and has a big influence in the industry is China Passenger Car Association (CPCA).
Its website says that CPCA was established in 1994 by Shanghai VW, PSA and seven other sedan manufacturers. Its original name was National Sedan Market Data Fellowship Society. Unlike CAAM, which is accredited by the government, CPCA is more of a non-governmental organization, and it is not qualified for automotive statistics or authorized by the government to gather and publish automotive statistical data. It is merely a data exchange platform between automotive companies. However, since it publishes its data before CAAM, and since its contents are more suited for the media, CPCA’s influence is becoming ever bigger. Just like CAAM, CPCA also gathers data from the reports submitted by the companies. But unlike CAAM, its data does not have to be approved by relevant government departments and the organization does not bear any legal liability for the data. Currently, CPCA publishes two types of sales data — general sales and wholesale. According to organization’s explanation, these two types of data are retail and wholesale data respectively. Normally, retail sales better reflect actual sales than wholesale, but since the sales data comes from auto manufacturers themselves, most of them come from 4S stores, which also have motive to submit false data on end buyers’ sales.
The industry generally believes that actual data should come from a third party. CAAM and CPCA data entirely depend on companies that want to hear the truth about other companies, but at the same time do not want not to tell the truth about themselves. Needless to say this kind of system has a lot of flaws. So, is there a third party data that can better reflect automotive market? That would be insurance data.
License plate data- Third party data that has never been made public Before we talk about insurance, let’s talk about something that is related to it — license plate data. After buying a car, owners need to pay purchase tax and mandatory insurance, and then go to traffic control department for a license plate. Tax, insurance and traffic control departments are the ones who hold auto tax, insurance and license plate data, i.e. automotive end buyer sales data. However, Ministry of Public Security does not make them public despite calls from the public. The Ministry used to sell the data, but after a while stopped.
Actually, in May 2010, China Automotive Technology and Research Center (CATARC) also started to publish monthly production and sales data. CATARC is China’s only technical committee for automotive standardization, which also provides technical support to government departments, so whenever a vehicle gets off the manufacturing line, the line prints factory approval certificate, which data is being sent to CATARC data center. When a vehicle is being registered, all traffic control departments in the country verify ID number on vehicle’s engine with approval certificate code. When a vehicle is registered, CATARC automatically records this vehicle as sold one.
Although many insiders believed at the time that these sales numbers are equal to license plate ones, the data still had some flaws. For example, CATARC could not see which city’s traffic department has verified vehicle’s ID, so it could not record geographical data, or manufacturers would change certificate as to make sales easier, which caused a vehicle to have multiple certificates, or vehicles in the villages often do not get registered, while imported cars do not have certificates, so it was impossible to track these vehicles, etc. What no one expected was that after only a few months, CATARC stopped publishing the data. Official explanation was that IT system was being upgraded and was not able to properly collect data. It also said that publishing data on monthly basis was costing CATARC a lot of resources. But people in the industry believe that CATARC was forced to stop, because it started to get in the way of somebody else’s business.
Insurance data — closer to end buyer data
Since then, CATARC started to cooperate with insurance departments and use mandatory insurance data as to acquire third party data on automotive end buyer sales, i.e. insurance data.
According to the Chinese laws, vehicles without mandatory insurance are not allowed to be used, so one might say that insurance data is identical to license plate data. But since CATARC is not qualified for statistical activities, in order to avoid any disputes, it does not publish the data, and only provides it to automotive companies for reference.
From all of this it can be seen that although China became one of major automotive markets in the world, it still does not have a transparent and impartial third party data source that would accurately reflect the market. So, the moment when Chinese consumers and manufacturers will not have to spend too much time and effort to get an accurate picture of the market, that will be a crucial moment in development of local automotive industry.
Author: DENG Ya
Original in Chinese: https://www.d1ev.com/news/shuju/96465
Translated and edited: MoneyballR
