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Strategies & Market Trends : Asia Forum
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To: Michael Sphar who wrote (106)12/24/1997 4:37:00 AM
From: Stitch  Read Replies (1) of 9980
 
Michael,
Singapore allows only so many new cars to be sold in any given period of time. They auction the "rights" in the form of a certificate. A set number of certificates for each class of car are auctioned in this fashion. Your friend may have mentioned that the class of car that fell to $S 50.00 for the cert in the last auction was the higher class of car such as Mercedes and Volvo sedans. The reason that the auction price fell to that low (your friend is right, as high as $ 62,000. actually) is that there just arent any buyers for that class of car.

In Malaysia the locally made Proton and Perodua are still subsidized in the sense that all others are taxed heavily in the form of custom duty. This makes the locally made cars much more inexpensive. This is true even if the "other brand" is largely assembled here and pretty much regardless of local content. Though their respective duty can be diminished by local content and assembly it can never reach the advantage of no duty as applied to the two local brands. I believe the high duties on outside brands, are set to diminish over some period of time by plan but I am not familiar with the schedule. As such, any car here in Malaysia with the exception of the local brands are quite expensive compared to what we are used to in the states. I purchased a totally rebuilt 8 year old Benz (280 E class) and the cost was 56K USD equivalent. Of course that was when the USD was fetching only about 2.50 Ringiit (Malaysian dollars). Today my car has depreciated much as a result of the devaluation. Still, the cost here is substantially less then Singapore.
Hope this explains what you were interested in. Merry Christmas!
Best ,
Stitch
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