The big rivalry South Africans should pay attention to in 2025

The battle between VW and Suzuki for the second-best-selling brand in South Africa will be one of the most interesting rivalries to keep an eye on in 2025.

VW has held this esteemed position for many years, rarely soaring to the heights of Toyota which has been the best-selling automaker in the nation for 45 summers, and seldomly being challenged by anyone else for the spot.

That was until 2022, when Suzuki started whittling down VW’s lead, inching ever closer to it on the sales charts. Since then it has even peaked above the maker of the venerable Polo on a few occasions, but never on a consistent basis.

Now that the 2024 sales numbers have been tallied up, we can see that Suzuki has never been as close to overtaking VW as it is right now, with the two being separated by a mere 6,865 units at the end of last year.

Compare this to just four years prior, when the deficit between the two nameplates was an astounding 46,954 units.

It’s worth keeping in mind that Audi’s sales are clumped in with that of VW as they both form part of the VW Group, inflating the latter’s perceived performance by a few hundred units every month.

As such, the Japanese automaker is even closer to trumping the German than the numbers suggest, with the battlefield poised to see blood in 2025.

Annual registrations for the two manufacturers from 2020 until 2024 are detailed below:

The downfall of VW

VW officially entered South Africa in 1951 and has been an industry powerhouse ever since.

Models like the Beetle, Golf, Kombi, and Passat tugged at the heartstrings of many a consumer, offering great build quality, affordable pricing, and good looks – the quintessential People’s Cars.

In the early 2000s and 2010s, things started getting tougher. Economically speaking, the country was in the doldrums.

The Rand/Euro exchange rate sat at R6.22/Euro in January 2000, rising to R10.63/Euro by January 2010, R15.99/Euro by January 2020, and R19.46/Euro by January 2025, a 213% devaluation in about 25 years.

To be clear, this had a negative effect on all manufacturers who import cars to South Africa – even Suzuki – with VW being among the hardest hit.

VW’s long legacy as Germany’s top vehicle producer, and the sheer scale of the business as a consequence thereof, coupled with stringent labour laws and government shareholding on its home turf, also meant that making changes is a cumbersome process and one littered with bureaucratic and regulatory hurdles.

This rendered it extremely difficult for VW to make quick moves and find new, more affordable markets to import from, as well as to cut costs.

VW has simultaneously been on a drive to improve its brand image so as to be viewed as more of a premium entry than one that caters to the masses.

“The key target is not growth,” Arno Antlitz, chief financial officer of VW, told the Financial Times in 2022.

“We are [more focused] on quality and on margins, rather than on volume and market share.”

It may just have shot itself in the foot by following this strategy. Its premium vehicles aren’t selling that well anymore, while the more affordable cars it virtually abandoned for a number of years have similarly lost much of their original appeal.

The ID. project furthermore proved to be one of losses instead of gains for VW.

VW pledged a monumental $100 billion in 2021 into electric-vehicle (EV) research and development for its range of ID.-branded cars, which subsequently cost the then-CEO Herbert Diess his job when EVs failed to take off as quickly as he thought it would.

While his replacement, Oliver Blume, has a more sober outlook on EVs, many of the decisions his predecessor made are still costing the company dearly.

As a result of ballooning prices and a focus on upward mobility in the automotive sphere, VW lost many of its die-hard patrons while failing to attract new ones fast enough.

In South Africa, its sales peaked in 2021 and have plateaued since then as more competition from the East arrives and affordability remains a key selling point.

The figures today are skewed to the more affordable end of VW’s portfolio.

Its cheapest car, the locally made Polo Vivo, outsells each one of its stablemates by a formidable margin every month, whilst nameplates such as the Golf, T-Cross, and Tiguan – once fan favourites- are no longer regular features on sales charts.

VW did seem to recognise its errors and introduced the new T-Cross to South Africa in 2024 at a price bracket it reckons is competitive.

Likewise, it updated the Polo Vivo for the first time in six years without increasing its window sticker in hopes of maintaining market share.

Could this be too little, too late? Only time will tell.

The rise of Suzuki

Suzuki officially arrived in South Africa in 2008 and experienced a slow start.

At the time, consumer sentiment towards cars of Asian descent wasn’t as positive as it is today, and the ensuing global financial crisis meant big-ticket purchases like new vehicles took a hit.

However, it offered a solid range of products covering the hatchback and SUV categories, and it didn’t let the small stream of customers deter it.

Suzuki kept its head down over the years and quietly launched more and more cars with attractive asking prices, amassing an increasing number of customers by the day.

However, it wasn’t until 2017 that things started to look up.

At this point in time, affordability was already a major concern for consumers while the reputation of Asian cars started to improve. The build quality of these cars was noticeably better than a decade ago, they were laden with new-age tech, and their prices were still relatively low in comparison to European autos.

Suzuki was in the perfect position to capitalise on this market shift, selling a decent 8,833 vehicles in the year 2017. While it may not sound like much, it was still enough to trump more established automakers such as Isuzu at the time.

Since then, Suzuki has gone from strength to strength thanks to a series of smart decisions.

Building and importing the majority of its vehicles from India helped it keep production and selling prices down in key regions such as South Africa, and focusing on the mass market with a wide range of crossovers, hatchbacks, and MPVs instead of the premium segment – the original VW ethos – kept it within reach of a large portion of the population.

Aggressive marketing through events such as the Suzuki Safari Town Festival – where it set a new Guinness World Record in 2023 – played a big role in getting the S-shaped badge in front of people’s eyes, too.

Suzuki Safari Town Festival

Its collaborative partnership with Toyota, announced in 2016, undoubtedly also assisted in cementing Suzuki’s reputation as a dependable brand.

After all, why would a company like Toyota, whose bread and butter is its reliability, form an alliance with another brand that will tarnish that street cred?

Suzuki didn’t hastily dive in on the EV craze, either, instead keeping a level head and focusing on costs as well as what the paying customer wants, not what it thinks they want.

These choices paid off tremendously. Since 2017, the company has broken its South African sales record 25 times, having first achieved 1,000 new purchases in one month in August 2017.

The next milestone came in October 2020 when it eclipsed 2,000 sales, which was followed by 3,000 in September 2021, and 4,000 in May 2022.

Over the course of 2023, the manufacturer had an average of 4,131 purchases every month, and welcomed its 200,000th South African customer.

Come January 2024, it eclipsed 5,000 monthly registrations with a grand total of 5,235, and in April, it announced that it had broken through the 50,000-sales-per-year barrier for the very first time in its history on local soil.

If it can keep this up, Suzuki may very well be South Africa’s second-best-selling car brand by the end of 2025.