Many new car brands in Malaysia are using the old technique of sharing booking numbers.
When I first joined the automotive media industry, I remember journalists always asking during launch Q&As what the number of registrations were for particular models. There was always a bit of rigour in separating booking numbers from actual translated sales numbers. Over time, particularly after 2018, we’ve seen more and more car companies use booking numbers in various marketing materials.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with sharing booking numbers. However, this often creates the falls impression that a car model is more popular than it actually is. To the lay person or potential customer, this is an easy way to get buzz going. Even if the booking numbers are exaggerated (only the car brands themselves know the real figure), it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The other issue is that bookings do not necessarily translate to sales. In the ‘old’ days, the main reason why booking numbers didn’t translate to sales was USUALLY because financing was tougher to secure for many customers. That’s still an issue today, but the market has changed dramatically. Today a new car seems to be launched every couple of weeks. Many bookings that are made in late January are cancelled by early February when the next best thing rolls around. Essentially, booking numbers do not signify where the customer ACTUALLY ends up spending their money.
Plus there are now about 2 dozen Chinese car brands operating in some capacity in Malaysia. Realistically not all will survive, but it’s also the legacy players who are now feeling the heat. The intense competition to capture market share has led to CONSTANT chest-thumping. Order books are sometimes opened with MINIMAL booking fees that can be done online and semi-anonymously. What’s stopping these car brands from allocating a sum of marketing funds to have a number of vehicles booked via an external PR or marketing company? After all, that booking fee goes back to the company’s coffers anyway and they can just internally disregard the planted numbers or cancel the bookings to keep it from interfering on the supply side. The net result is free publicity from manipulated booking numbers.
The booking numbers can also be used to confuse or intimidate rivals. One brand can share inflated booking numbers and cause the others to re-evaluate their position ahead of their own model’s launch.
Of course, we can’t PROVE that this is what is happening, but what it should tell you is that booking numbers are meaningless and can be easily exploited. Even when 100% genuine, they can translate to just 30-40% of actual registrations. If you want to see how well a car model is doing, look for JPJ registration data (though these bundle in grey market vehicles) or MAA’s monthly sales and production numbers (though these are no longer broken down brand-by-brand as they used to be).
We hope the industry can go back to keeping booking numbers to themselves and instead come together to the old way of letting MAA share real numbers, brand-by-brand, and hopefully model-by-model, maybe ever variant-by-variant so that automotive journalists can do meaningful work on this data and we can all understand the trends in the industry better.
