South Korea’s car output down in September on reduced working days

Paragraph entered by Atlantic migration, in order for SteelFirst articles to display correctly on Metal Bulletin.

The decline was due to reduced working days linked to the mid-autumn festival holidays in September as well as the absence of weekend overtime work at some automotive assembly plants, Kama said.

Production for the first nine months of the year totalled 3.25 million units, down 2.1% compared with the corresponding period last year.

Domestic sales in September were down 12.6% year-on-year at 101,846 units, affected by reduced business days and supply shortage.

This put domestic sales for the first nine months of the year again in negative territory, down 0.6% over a year ago.

Exports were at their lowest monthly level this year in September at 187,405 units, down 18.9% from the same period a year ago. This was due to growing global economic uncertainty, increasing overseas production of Korean brand cars and supply shortage, Kama said.

This took total exports for the first nine months of 2013 to 2.23 million units, down 4.6% from a year earlier.