KUALA LUMPUR, April 10 — Perodua has maintained its positive production and sales momentum in March, with production at 33,666 units and sales at 32,179 vehicles.

In a statement today, Perodua said production jumped by 33.9 per cent to 84,800 units in the first quarter of 2023 (1Q 2023) from 63,325 units produced in 1Q 2022.

Registration rose by 27.5 per cent to 78,564 units during the same period from 61,624 units in 1Q 2022, while sales rose by 20.2 per cent from 26,759 units sold in March last year.

Chief executive officer, Datuk Seri Zainal Abidin Ahmad attributed the automaker’s upbeat performance to improvements throughout its supplier ecosystem and better coordination within its sales network, as well as its efforts to fulfil the sales and service tax (SST)-exempted orders before its deadline on March 31, 2023.

"Despite these achievements, there are still a small number of PENJANA orders that we were unable to fulfil, but we will honour the SST-exempted amount guaranteed under the initiative and we apologise to our customers for the long wait,” he said.

Zainal Abidin said that the number of bookings for Perodua models remained healthy, while production growth helped to reduce some of the waiting periods rather significantly for certain models.

"Only particular models such as the Bezza, Axia and Alza have a slightly longer waiting period based on their respective variants and colour,” he said.

He noted that the global price of raw materials has decreased, thus easing cost pressures for suppliers as well as most of the automotive players.

"These favourable conditions will give Perodua a chance to build up our stock faster while at the same time enabling us to reduce the waiting period for our customers,” he said, adding that Perodua targets to produce 330,000 cars and register sales of 314,000 cars in 2023. — Bernama