Middle East bounces back
Export markets for Toyota and Holden are finally recovering from the GFCThe Gulf Countries that are the backbone of export sales for Australian manufacturers are dusting themselves off in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis.
Both Holden and Toyota are dependent on these markets for sustainable local production and both companies have seen a surge in demand for their locally-manufactured products.
Senior executive director of sales and marketing for Toyota, David Buttner, highlighted the change in fortune during a joint press conference conducted yesterday by the FCAI and Toyota.
"As local and overseas markets recovered from the Global Financial Crisis last year, we lifted production at our Melbourne manufacturing facility by 24 per cent to almost 120,000 cars," Buttner said. "Of these, almost 83,000 were exported -- mainly to the Middle East, an increase of over 30 per cent over previous years."
"Primarily [export growth came from] Saudi Arabia," Buttner told the Carsales Network. "So that whole Gulf Cooperative Council region had a bit of a drop-off in 2009; they were impacted by the Global Financial Crisis. There's huge growth in Saudi Arabia."
It's still some way shy of Toyota's exports to the region in 2007, when Camrys and Aurions sold overseas amounted to about 90,000 units, according to Buttner, but it's a sign that the viability of export production from Altona is returning to that earlier level of success.
Holden doesn't currently have figures for Commodore export sales, but according to Corporate Communications Manager Emma Watts, GM's locally-built large car is also gaining ground in the Middle East.
"We won't actually release export details until we release our financial details in April, [but] anecdotally I can say that there has been an improvement on the 2009 year..." she said.
While Watts was not in a position to reveal Holden's financial standing and how that has been specifically bolstered by Middle East exports, she did say that the company was "on track to be back in the black".
Curiously, both the UAE's Dirham and Saudi-Arabia's Riyal are effectively linked to the US dollar, meaning that the landed cost of Aussie-built cars in those markets is roughly the same as the cars landed in the US. Therefore, the strength of the Aussie dollar should be a hurdle selling Australian cars in these countries, but that doesn't appear to be the case.
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