Mazda backs away from sales battles

We just don't care! That's the response from Mazda to the prospect of dropping out of the top three selling brands and top importer slot in Australia in 2014, and to the Mazda3 being beaten by the Toyota Corolla to the title of the country's top-selling individual model.

Mazda, which finished top importer and third overall in 2013 and 2012 behind Toyota and Holden, was knocked back into fourth by Hyundai in November, with the Korean brand ahead by just 381 sales year to date.

Meawhile, the Mazda3 closed the gap on the Corolla at the top of the sales ladder in November and with one sales month left to run is only 679 sales behind.

But at a media briefing in Melbourne this afternoon, Mazda Australia marketing manager Alastair Doak made it clear there would be no special strategies – such as pre-registering cars – to artifically drive up results.

"I know you'll think 'here we go', but it really is just a number to us," when asked about finishing on the podium. "We are more about what is that number? How many are we going to sell? Are we looking after our customers?

"Those are the sorts of things we are interested in and will concentrate on. Was it nice we were the top-selling import brand for a long time and may still be this year? Yeah, it was nice..."   

Doak said whatever the final result between 3 and Corolla, the Mazda  would still be the top -elling car for Australian private buyers, as a significant number of the Toyota's sales go to rental fleets.

"We will do what we want to do," he said of Mazda3 sales. "We have a [target] number, we will do that number hopefully. And we will see what they (Toyota) want to do.

"We won''t be doing anything silly like registering cars or anything like that, it will just be natural demand."

Doak said he was confident that Mazda Australia would finish with more than 100,000 sales for the fourth consecutive calendar year in 2014 – short of its 103,000 target -- although the company must sell more than 8000 cars in December to do it.

"The momentum is there," he said."We dialled up our retail a little in November and that momentum is there in the marketplace.

"By pure luck or co-oincidence we have our core models in run-out . So we are running out CX-5, we are running out Mazda6 and we are allso running out model year 2014 Mazda3 as well.

"We are confident that will give us a bit of a run into December."

Doak also predicted the arrival of facelifted Mazda6 medium car and top-selling CX-5 medium SUV in the first quarter of 2015, the CX-3 small SUV in the second quarter, the updated BT-50 commercial in the second half and the hotly-anticipated fourth-generation MX-5 sports car towards the end of the year should help the company establish a new Australian sales record next year.

The Japanese brand showed off the upgraded Mazda6, upgraded CX-5 and all-new CX-3 at its Melbourne function today.

"I would hope we should do better," Doak said of 2015 sales. "Our best is 103,000 and change (103,886, in 2012), so you would hope we would get there. But it is market dependant.

"We thought we would have a better year this year, but it turned out to be softer than we predicted."

Doak said Mazda expected the overall new vehicle sales market to stabilise in 2015 after trending down in 2014.

"It should pretty much stay flat next year. At least it should stop falling and be marginally better than this year. Our economists say economic conditions should improve next year, although they aren't that bad now."