Suzuki hit yet another sales milestone in South Africa this October, breaching the 6,000-unit mark for the first time in the domestic market.
The Japanese carmaker is one of the country’s fastest-growing brands, going from a fringe top 10 entry to one of the three biggest names in the game in just a few years.
Shooting for the stars
Suzuki had a record month this past October with 6,006 passenger car sales, making it the third best-performing brand behind VW and Toyota.
This marks an all-time sales achievement for the automaker, shattering its previous record of just over 5,000 units from January 2024.
“Given the challenges of the current economic climate, breaking the 6,000-unit barrier is a hard-fought milestone that everyone in our South African unit can be immensely proud of achieving,” said Henno Havenga, General Manager of Sales and Marketing at Suzuki Auto South Africa.
A big part of this success can be attributed to the Swift – the brand’s most popular nameplate – which recently entered its fourth generation.
Thanks to eager customers who were prepared to buy a Swift on day one, the hatchback managed to rack up an impressive 1,179 units in October – 985 (83.5%) of which were for the new variants.
Suzuki’s success wasn’t solely built on the back of the Swift, though, as the Fronx crossover and Baleno hatchback pulled in another 1,109 and 672 customers, respectively.
It’s worth remembering that Suzuki wasn’t always this successful in South Africa, as it didn’t even feature in the top 10 back in 2018.
However, the manufacturer experienced a surge in popularity in 2019 that it has held onto ever since, thanks in no small part to its selection of affordable vehicles.
Car prices have skyrocketed over the past five years, and this is being reflected in a change in consumer spending, as people are moving away from luxury brands like BMW and Mercedes-Benz towards cheaper options, primarily from Asia.
A few of the biggest winners of this shift have been Chinese badges like Chery and GWM, but Suzuki has steadily earned its way to the top to the point that it is now competing with Volkswagen for the title of South Africa’s second-favourite brand.
The table below, which was compiled by Lightstone Auto, illustrates the shift in the South African car space since 2009:
Suzuki has been comfortably sitting in third place since 2022, and it is still growing with more records being broken every year.
Earlier this year, the carmaker announced that that had sold over 50,000 vehicles in a financial year for the first time, from April 2023 to March 2024.
It also came to light that Suzuki outsold VW for the first time in February on the technicality that Audi’s sales are counted as part of VW’s total, meaning that the Japanese firm outperformed its rival in an apples-to-apples comparison.
This ambiguity was later removed when Suzuki beat VW outright in April – something that would have been inconceivable just a few years earlier.
In an era where cars are more expensive than ever, models like the R219,900 Swift, R284,900 Baleno, and R298,900 Fronx are clearly resonating with motorists, which is a trend that is likely to continue unless market conditions improve.
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