Survey: Chinese Car Buyers Going Online

A new online survey in China reveals that 78% of those people who had purchased a car in the last 3 years said that they relied on Internet-related research to influence their buying decisions. 86% of those who purchased a car in the last 3 years also said they received good or excellent information in the automobile dealer’s showroom.

Atom Survey and Xianzai.cn, both subsidiaries of BDL Media Ltd., today announced the results of the survey conducted online in Chinese and results compiled from January 4-15 with a total of 2400 Chinese respondents who lived in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou.

39% of the respondents live in Beijing, 42% live in Shanghai, and 19% currently live in Guangdong. Overall, 65% were male and 35% were female.

All of the respondents said that they had either purchased a car in the last 3 years or were planning to purchase a car in the next 6 months. 57% had purchased a car in the last 3 years, and 43% were planning to purchase a car in the next 6 months.

When seeking information online, the most important buying decisions were based on pricing (86%), color (83%) options (79%), and comparisons among different automobile makes and models (78%).

The most popular options sought were tinted windows (62%), security systems (60%), and airbags (53%).

When asked to gauge the quality of the nationalities of different car manufactures, men believed that Italian cars were the best, followed by German, American, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese cars.

Results from the women showed similar beliefs in a car’s quality with Italian engineering at the top, followed by German, American, Korean, Japanese, and Chinese.

But when asked what type of car they were most likely to purchase, or had purchased already, men said they were most inclined to buy domestic Chinese cars, followed by German, Japanese, American, Korean, and Italian.

Women said they were likely to purchase a German car, Chinese car, Korean, American, Japanese, or Italian cars, in that order.

For those respondents who had already purchased a car, 83% were members of the manufacturer’s automotive club and 20% were members of other automotive club.

Atom Survey conducted this survey as a marketing analysis for Xianzai.cn. The respondents are all subscribers to Xianzai.cn’s Chinese-language email newsletters. The full results are part of Xianzai.cn’s materials which are distributed to clients.

For more information, please contact Atom Survey at www.atomsurvey.com.