Kuwaiti Vehicles Market in 2024 keeps falling. Sales in September continued 8 months negative string and reached 10,468 units (-14.4%). YTD figures stood at 96,886 (-5.2%).
Market Trend and Outlook
The Kuwaiti economy is projected to contract by 1.4 percent in 2024, following a 2.2 percent decline in real economic activity in 2023. This contraction is primarily driven by the oil sector, which is expected to shrink by 4.3 percent in 2024 due to a series of OPEC+ production quota cuts implemented in May 2023 and January 2024.
Reflecting these economic challenges, the Kuwaiti Vehicles Market in September 2024 lost 14.4% while accumulating 10,468 registrations. YTD sales reached 96,886 units (-5.2%).
Looking at cumulative data up to September 2024 brand-wise, Toyota was still the leader at 26,533 sales and a market share of 27.4, despite reporting a 17.1% loss in registrations from the prior year. Nissan lagged far behind in second, holding a market share of 8.0% and 7,673 sales (-3.3%).
Ford -up 1 spot- secured 3rd position with 6,913 cumulative registrations and a 14.2% growth year-on-year volume.
Looking at specific models the Toyota Land Cruiser was still the best seller despite losing 30% in year-on-year volume, followed by the Ford Territory, up 19.6%.
Medium-Term Market Trend
The development of the domestic car market in Kuwait had a gold era over a decade ago, when strong economic growth, high oil prices and high worker immigration pushed the market up for years until reaching the 2014 all-time record with 162,719.
Then, the economy started struggling with the fall of oil price in the international market and public spending was cut while taxes increases. The car market start struggling and declined for 3 consecutive years. When in 2018 and 2019 a shy recovery was in place, the arrival of the pandemic pushed sales down at the last 15 years record-low of 88.000.
However, since early 2021 the economic recovery sustained consumers demand and the market is recovering.
The Kuwaiti Vehicles Market in 2023 grew 17.1% from the previous year, totalling 140,519.
Tables with sales figures
In the tables below we report sales for top 10 Brands and top 10 models.
