Skoda here for the long haul

Brands in the Australian new car market face headwinds for three to four years before a settling will occur, according to Skoda Australia Managing Director, Lucie Kuhn.

Speaking to carsales at the recent pre-production drive of the new 2025 Skoda Elroq battery-electric small SUV, Ms Kuhn said that she had not seen another market quite like Australia, where up to 80 brands fight it out for around a million annual sales.

“The market in Australia is unusually fragmented; in no other market do you see 70 or 80 brands competing with each other,” she said.

With incoming and primarily Chinese brands intensifying competition, there will be a prompt shake out, Kuhn believes, before the market returns to a more stable number of competitors.

“It will stabilise in a few years,” she said. “In the next three to four years though, it will be quite intense.”

Most brands will find the influx of competition easy, said Kuhn, but she believes that Skoda is prepared for what is coming.

“We will overcome these few years with a very focused approach to the market, to the customers; but it will be a painful few years for many OEMs I believe, yes.”

While Skoda is a legacy brand (itself celebrating 130 years as a vehicle manufacturer) it is also part of one of the world’s largest car manufacturing groups, said Kuhn, cementing the Czech manufacturer’s long-term vision as a player in the Australian market.

“We are a strong brand, as we are a member of the Volkswagen Group,” she said. “We are offering a stable portfolio. There’s a lot of focus in the Volkswagen Group on safety, sustainability and consistency.”

Skoda has faced headwinds in recent years, with a 2025 sales decline of
32 per cent to the end of March year on year, on the back of a 2024 sales calendar year itself down a steep 37.3 per cent on 2023, according to industry statistician VFACTS.

Kuhn acknowledged the figures, saying the brand is at a pivotal point in its model range.

“Last year was pretty low, but we had the oldest portfolio ever – we were only just starting to refresh the models in the last year. Many models were in runout, basically,” she said.

“That is what will change this year; we will bring more or less a completely new portfolio, so we have all-new facelifts for Fabia, Kamiq and Scala, a new generation of Kodiaq on the way, and in two months [we have] Elroq and Enyaq coming too, so I think this year will be a year of full product availability in terms of age and size.”

Kuhn believes Skoda revisiting its strategy on pricing and specs across the board will also help the brand return to better sales volumes.

“Of course [new models] is just one of the factors that will help us increase the volumes back to higher numbers,” she said.

“We now have some competitive pricing, which was not the case maybe last year or in particular the year before, and some price corrections also.

“We were looking for the right scaling across the range, to find a good proportion among each individual model, and work in the right way with the value that is connected to the right car. To create a logical sequence in the pricing and the specification to make it more logical and understandable to the customer.”

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