Coatings World - October 2012

The Road Ahead A Look at China’s Automotive Coatings Market

Repair and OEM coatings markets are fundamentally very different, as one shadows automotive production and the other follows more closely with customer preferences. Luke Johnson, senior analyst at GCiS China Strategic Research, discusses some of the findings from their recent market study on automotive coatings.

What were some of the general findings of the report? Luke Johnson, senior analyst at GCiS China Strategic Research: Although the report was released in July 2012, the base year of the study is 2011. The market study is broken into two main segments: OEM coatings and repair coatings. Altogether, the market is worth about RMB18 billion (USD2.9 billion), not including exports, and more importantly, output is about 463,000 tons. The OEM market is significantly bigger at about 313,000 tons, whereas the repair coatings market is about 150,000 tons, growing at about 16 percent and 17. 3 percent respectively.

Besides passenger cars, busses, trucks and engineering equipment are also significant users of the OEM and repair coatings. For OEMs at least, buses and trucks account for about 75,000 tons of the total OEM coating figure.

One of the most interesting points is the complications of addressing the repair coatings market. Basically, repair coatings are difficult to define in China. A company, really only domestic, might sell the same paint to repair shops as they do to low speed electric vehicle, or even bus and truck, OEMs. This makes a total market size difficult to define, especially when you compare numbers offered by domestic companies with those of foreign companies.