By George Guimarães | 3/14/23 | Translated by Jorge Meditsch
The blanket has been short at Citroën in Brazil. Even with an automobile lineup reduced to just two national models, the brand needs much more production in Porto Real – or even more new products – to achieve a more relevant role in the internal market.
With the arrival of the New C3 in the second half of 2022, C4 Cactus’s sales plunged. While the hatch sales grew as expected in the first months, the five-year-old compact registers fell dramatically.
In September, the first month of the refurbished C3 in the market, the Cactus sold 2.1 thousand units against 1.6 thousand hatches. In October, it had the first setback: the brand sold just 1.2 thousand units of the Cactus and 2.6 thousand of the new entry model.
Since then, things only got worse for the Cactus. Last month it had only 253 units delivered, in front of C3’s 1.5 thousand, a five-to-one proportion also registered last January and December last year.
Citroën sold 18.5 thousand Cactus in 2022, but only five thousand from September through December. The first bimester of 2023 emphasized the model’s sales difficulties: only 542 units reached the streets, as the C3 sold 2.8 thousand.
Since its launch in 2018, the Cactus has had 68 thousand units sold in the internal market, with a 19.5 thousand units record in 2021.
An aesthetic update is scheduled to arrive at the dealers in the first semester, but it should not facilitate the hard way the model will have ahead in the larger market segment, with about 50 national and imported options to compete with and constant new launches.
Stellantis is developing the C-Cubed project that, besides the New C3, should have two new vehicles launched in Brazil up to 2024, one of them yet this year. One of them should replace the current Cactus, which has already completed its natural life cycle, as numbers prove.
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