Chery Australia says it does not participate in the rolling discount cycle of other Chinese brands, arguing that constant sticker changes erode trust and hurt resale value.
Chery Australia chief operating officer Lucas Harris said Daily Sparkz The brand’s approach is to “get it right at launch and then maintain it,” rather than chasing frequent price moves from competitors.
“For us, we don’t think there’s a real price war… we don’t feel like we’re participating in it,” Mr. Harris said.
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He cites the brand’s entry-level SUV as an example.
“Look at Tiggo 4… The price is exactly the same since we launched it 18 months ago and frankly we have no intention of changing it,” he said, adding the caveat that the company will have to make adjustments if the launch price is wrong and that it has learned from that in the past.
“We saw that in the early days of Tiggo 7. Frankly I think we launched it at the wrong price so we postponed it – Omoda 5 to a lesser extent but we postponed it,” he said.
The process, he says, relies on dealer advice and consumer research rather than reactive benchmarking.
“We’ve tried to put a lot of effort into making sure that when we launch the product we get it right the first time… We can look at the market and see who’s setting prices where, but that might not mean much because tomorrow everything could be completely different.”
The long-term goal of holding the line is to stabilize residual values and thus customer trust.
“If we’re constantly cutting and changing prices dramatically, that’s going to have a really negative impact on residual value for customers,” Mr. Harris said. “It’s about consistency and earning the right to sell them another car.”
There is also an operational aspect behind this attitude. Mr Harris says pricing decisions will be made in collaboration with retailers, rather than left to them, as part of a wider effort to establish sustained retailer economics.
“Before we price a car, we actually have very detailed discussions with the network… We try to be very sincere and when we talk about partnership, we try to act like it and not just say it,” he said.
The approach comes with compromises. In a market where some competitors adjust recommended retail prices or run frequent promotions, a launch-and-hold discipline can cost short-term market share if competitors suddenly hesitate on price.
Mr. Harris counters that predictability is worth more than a snappy sales graph, especially for customers financing a car and dealers planning margin and inventory turns.
Ultimately, Chery’s pricing policy is a bet that trust and resale are more important than winning the weekly price headline. Whether this is true as competition increases can be measured not only by monthly car sales, but also by how often Chery has to correct its course and how consistently these corrections are explained to customers and dealers.
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