It says that after an extensive analysis of all data harvested, processed and distributed, it became evident that a member, Nissan South Africa, erroneously reported sales figures for its various models for the reporting month of March 2024, which are herewith corrected in the interest of ensuring that accurate information is shared with the South African market and with all other interested parties across the auto value chain.

Accordingly, the aggregate domestic new vehicle sales in March 2024, was initially reported by naamsa at 44 237 units, but has been adjusted downwards by only two units to reflect a corrected new figure of 44 235 units. With this correction, the aggregate domestic new vehicle sales for March 2024 reflected a decline of 5 879 units, a fall of 11.7% from the 50 114 vehicles sold in March 2023.

While this correction may appear negligible, the materiality rests in the segmentation breakdown of the numbers reported. The new passenger car market for the period under review reported last week at 26 577 units has now been adjusted upwards with an increase of 242 units to a corrected 26 819 units. This correction confirms a decline of 4 782 cars [instead of an erroneously reported number of 5,024 cars], or a loss of 15.1%, compared to the 31 601 new cars sold in March 2023.

The initially reported number for domestic sales of new light commercial vehicles, bakkies and minibuses at 14 870 units should decrease by 244 units to 14,626 units during March 2024 recording a decline of 916 units, or a loss of 5.9%, from the 15 542 light commercial vehicles sold during the corresponding period last year.

The Nissan NP200, marking the end of its production on 31 March 2024, registered its strongest performance with sales of 2 679 units in March 2024. This impressive record was unfortunately distorted by the inaccurate data reported where some of these numbers were attributed to the Nissan Navara instead of the NP200.

It is extremely important to issue this erratum, not only to correct the numbers and our public records, but also to allow Nissan to celebrate the NP200 sales milestone with the South African public and the entire industry since the production of this model has been discontinued in SA.

Naamsa regrets the erroneous release of the data reported to us earlier last week, and we will continue to work with all our members and partners to ensure that the credibility and the integrity of our data are not compromised nor contested.

Maintaining high data accuracy ensures that all our records and different datasets meet the criteria for reliability and trustworthiness so they can be used across the market to support policy development, decision-making and to assist in various applications across the market, it says.