TEHRAN - The secretary of the Iranian Automobile Importers Association, Mehdi Dadfar, has said the country needs about one million-1.2 million cars every year, noting that the annual imports of 70,000 automobiles seems logical, IRIB reported on Tuesday.

The official mentioned the parliament’s recent decision on allowing the imports of cars into the country, saying: “After four years, the government and parliament have come to the conclusion that the needs of the country's car market could be met through a combination of production and imports, which is a turning point in this industry.”

“There is no doubt that the country’s two major car producers have total control over the demand in the domestic market and according to the amount of production, their supply accounts for 95 percent of the market, but when the needs of the market cannot be met with domestic production, we must do so by importing cars,” Dadfar stated.

The official noted that the support for domestic production should be in the form of tax exemptions or reductions in the share of social security payments, not by banning imports and disrupting the market when the demand is higher than domestic production.

“This has increased the price of foreign cars sharply, and after four years we have reached this conclusion that we need to import 70,000 cars annually,” he added.

According to Dadfar, since the Iranian calendar year 1370 (late March 1991) so far over 770,000 cars have been imported into the country and the average number of annually imported cars since the Iranian calendar year 1390 (late March 2011) so far has been 55,000.

He said over the past decade every year over one million cars have been distributed in the domestic market on average.

The official noted that the parliament’s decision for allowing the imports of foreign cars is going to reduce the prices of domestic products in the coming year.

According to the data released by the Codal website, three major Iranian carmakers, namely Iran Khodro Company (IKCO), SAIPA Group, and Pars Khodro, manufactured 760,527 vehicles during the first 10 months of the current Iranian calendar year (March 21, 2021-January 20, 2022).

According to the data, the production by the mentioned companies rose just 4.1 percent compared to the previous year’s same 10 months in which the output stood at 730,477.

EF/MA