The shift in the world regions of automobile production

Asia produces more than every second car in the world

October 26th, 2021 – We differentiate the world regions of automobile production first without considering their market shares into the European Union, North America, Latin America as well as East and Southeast Asia (from India over China to South Korea, Japan and Southeast Asia including Australia).

In the last twenty years the market shares of these world regions shifted drastically. This happened against the background of an up to 2017 continuously growing world automobile production, whose index climbed up from 64.3 (2000) to 107.2 in 2017. Since then global automobile production has been sinking to lastly 85.5 index points (2020).

In 2000 the European Union was still the leading world region of automobile production with 33% market share. Twenty years later its market share has been almost cut half to 17%.

Also the portion of North America (the USA and Canada) halved itself from 27% to 13% during this period despite increasing world automobile production.

Latin America’s automobile production increased in step with the worldwide one keeping its market shares constant.

Asia became by far the leading world region of the automobile production. Car production in these countries did not only keep up but outstripped the average growth of the worldwide production of vehicles so that its market share leapt up from 31% to 51% (2010) within ten years and achieved 56% in 2020.

So nowadays worldwide more than each second vehicle is produced in Asia.

To the reasons of this shift

Worldwide automobile production is part of the world-wide industrial production. In the worldwide industrial production structural changes started in 2000 undermining lastingly the growth in the industrialized countries by this day. This is the main factor for the shift of automobile production from the European Union and North America to the Asian area. There only Japan’s growth is structurally weakened so far.

The automobile manufacturing particularly clearly shows the trend to the internationalization of production since 2000. Nowadays GM, VOLKSWAGEN or Nissan are producing more cars in China as in their homeland or Suzuki more cars in India than in Japan.