BYD and Chery are crushing other major Chinese car brands in South Africa, according to a recent report by Press Pulse.
This is based on media sentiment rankings, as Press Pulse uses AI to measure the overall sentiment of online media reports in South Africa.
Press Pulse focuses on business reporting from South Africa’s top quality media publications to measure how successfully companies achieve positive exposure in the market.
To do this, it analyses the tone of articles from these publications to determine whether they are positive, neutral, or negative. It also takes the reach and influence of each publication into account.
Press Pulse then uses this data to rank the brands according to their overall sentiment score.
To put it simply – the more positive articles are written about a brand, the better its sentiment ranking will be. The inverse holds too – more negative media coverage will produce a lower sentiment score.
South Africa’s Chinese car market
We used Press Pulse to gain insights into the Chinese car market in South Africa.
We looked at the sentiments over the past year to determine which brands are leading, and BYD and Chery took the lead.
Here are the results:
The two car brands almost tied, with BYD achieving a sentiment score of 153.81 and Chery achieving an almost-identical sentiment score of 153.46.
This shows a strong positive reception to the two brands in South Africa. BYD taking the lead is particularly impressive given that it only launched in South Africa in 2023.
BYD has aggressively launched new vehicle after new vehicle in South Africa, which likely helped it to take the lead over Chery, especially in the last term of the year.
Both brands have contributed significantly to the growth of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV) in South Africa, with BYD launching the first PHEV under R500,000 recently.
Other brands like Jetour and Jaecoo launched even more recently, so their positive scores (Jetour: 20.1 and Jaecoo: 30.77) are also impressive.
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