Following the news that Japan car sales recovery helped November 2021 GDP to grow by 1.5%;

Bakar Sadik Agwan, Senior Automotive Consulting Analyst at GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company, offers his view:

“Japanese economy was under pressure in 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic induced supply constraints across industries. However, with the easing of ‘chip shortages’ and ‘stabilizing demand’, Japan automotive market is anticipated to continue the recovery trail and witness a bounce back in production and exports, which in turn is expected to boost the economic growth in 2022. As per the data from Japan Automobile Manufacturer Association (JAMA), vehicle exports in October and November were up month-on-month by 23.6% and 39.1%, respectively.

“Though the Japanese vehicle market showed some positive developments in the starting months of 2021 due to the pent-up demand, during the second half it was affected over the semiconductor shortages and the Omicron variant. Therefore, vehicle sales, production and export all remained impacted. GlobalData estimates the production and sales to decline by 2% and 3.8%, respectively, year-on-year in 2021.

“Manufacturing sector constitutes over 89% of the total GDP in Japan and automotive and ancillary manufacturing remains a substantial part of it. GlobalData’s latest forecasts expect 2021 full-year real GDP growth to be 1.82% and lays positive expectation for the for 2022 with 2.99% growth over 2021, which is backed on the positive expectation for the automotive market.”