|
 As consumer demand waned after four straight months of gains, Brazil's automobile sales fell 13.7% in April when compared to previous month , the national automakers' association Anfavea said on Friday, May 8.
Sales also fell 10.3% from April 2008 to 234.400 and automobile output dropped 6.9% month-on-month in April and was down 15.8% from a year earlier to 254.700 units.
Four months of rising car sales had fueled hopes that Latin America's biggest auto industry could already be over the worst of the global crisis, even as makers elsewhere face plunging demand.
Sales had jumped 36.2% in March from the previous month, the fourth straight rise, and production had soared 34.2%, helped by government tax breaks that have allowed dealers to lower consumer prices.
Brazil, Latin America's largest economy, is a major market for global automakers such as Italy's Fiat; Germany's Volkswagen; US-based General Motors Corp and Ford Motor Co. Asian and French manufacturers are also increasingly relying on Brazil to offset slumping sales at home.
Fiat tallied the most sales in April with 58,226 units, down 9.7% from March. Volkswagen was second, with 52,821 vehicles, a fall of 17.9%.
The national dealers' association, Fenabrave, said this week that new car, truck and bus sales in Brazil dropped 13.6% in April from March.
Resilient consumption fueled by a tax break that cut showroom prices by about 10% percent had put the world's fifth-biggest auto market in a small group of countries whose car industries had shown glimmers of a recovery. But the export sector has been hit hard. Exports rose 5.8% in April from March but were down a hefty 45.9% from a year ago.
Anfavea expects sales to fall this year for the first time since 2003, forecasting a decline of 3.9% to 2.71 million units. It sees output falling 11.2% to 2.86 million vehicles, the first fall since 2002.
Mercopress
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose. 
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj). 
A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.