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Kia Motors America posts March 2008 sales
Kia Motors America -KMA today announced March sales of 24,871 units and year-to-date sales of 68,214 units.
Spectra and Rio had their best selling months of the year with 8,022 and 3,514 units sold respectively. Both vehicles also experienced increases year-to-date in the first quarter, and over the same period last year.
Sales of Kia’s Optima dropped 44.3 percent to 2,404 vehicles, while sales of the Sportage fell 26.3 percent to 3,171 and Sorento sales slid 45.9 percent to 2,039.Total sales for the month of March also rose 13 percent over the previous month.
So far this year, Kia sales are down 7.3 percent to 68,214 from 73,603 at the same time last year.
Kia Motors America (KMA) is the sales, marketing and distribution arm of Kia Motors Corporation based in Seoul, South Korea. KMA offers a complete line of vehicles through more than 640 dealers throughout the United States. For 2007, KMA recorded its 14th consecutive year of record U.S. sales.
Kia Motors subscribes to a philosophy of building high value, high quality, safe and dynamic vehicles. Kia Motors prides itself on producing vehicles that are exciting and enabling and evoke the Kia tagline “The Power to Surprise.”
| MONTH OF MARCH | YEAR-TO-DATE | |||
| Model | 2008 | 2007 | 2008 | 2007 |
| Rio | 3,514 | 3,044 | 9,098 | 6,309 |
| Spectra | 8,022 | 5,675 | 18,013 | 14,493 |
| Optima | 2,404 | 4,318 | 9,196 | 9,425 |
| Amanti | 173 | 945 | 556 | 2,738 |
| Sportage | 3,171 | 4,304 | 9,786 | 11,715 |
| Sorento | 2,039 | 3,771 | 4,621 | 10,079 |
| Sedona | 2,737 | 3,996 | 7,291 | 15,924 |
| Rondo | 2,811 | 1,514 | 9,653 | 2,920 |
| Total | 24,871 | 27,567 | 68,214 | 73,603 |
only spectra, rio and rondo sales are rising. lets see what happens with the new optima.
Some automakers had good sales in March and other didn’t. Honda and Nissan both increassed it’s sales and after a long period of time, Hyundai also managed to move more cars than last March. On the other side we have Toyota that lost about 3,4% and Kia which also had not so good month.
Kia not only had bad month but also slow new year start with sales falling by 5000units compared to last year.
And models like Sorento, Amanti, Sedona and Sportage are not in favour to good sales. Until at least two of these models are replaced, I don’t expect to see Kia set sales records again! I wish it sold better, but Sorento and Amanti are uncompetitive these days.
Kia released an intention to achive another sales record this year, but this will be tough job! Without new models it will be almost impossible to achive even last year’s sales record. And new models such as Spectra and Soul will not be here by the year’s end.
While08 will be, in my opinion, transitional year for Kia, neyt year the sales could rise again again!
I don’t know how much this affects sales, but 2007 is when the slightly new Amanti was released. It had some minor changes to the exterior and interior, and the new 3.8L V6. So perhaps some people that had 2003 Amantis (first year) decided to exchange for a “newer” vehicle? If you look at the numbers for 2007 and 2008 Amanti, they sold a decent amount last year in comparison with this year.
amanti is really in need of a major rediesign. so does sportage, Rio and now, even carnival. Sorento has to look more rugged like wrangler but Kia seems to be going the crossover way with the sorento.
In my opinion, Sorento MUST become a crossover! One BOF (Borrego) vehicle is enough to have in line-up. BOFs are loosing popularity against crossovers on a large scale! And if the companies don’t follow the trend they loose sales.