#خليها_تصدي - Khaleeha Tesady – The latest consumer boycott campaign against the greedy car dealers and importers in Egypt !

It is no secret that the Egyptian automotive market as well as the Egyptian automotive ‘advertising’ media are some of the worst, if not THE worst worldwide.

The greed of the automotive importers, the local automotive show-room owners as well as the local automotive assembly ‘workshops’ knows no limit in Egypt. While the profit margin of sports cars and luxury cars like the Porsche or BMW models is between 5-9 % in Europe, most of the profit margins for such high-end cars in Egypt start from 30% and in some cases even reach 100% for some of the locally-assembled cars.

Even in the lower segment of 70.000 to 100.000 LE (approx. 7.000 – 12.000 US $) the profit margin of some car companies like Ghabbour (Geely and Hyundai assembler and importer in Egypt ) or General Motors Egypt / Chevrolet Mansour could reach between 30 to 50%.

The latest desperate attempt of the unprofessional and greedy Egyptian car dealers of selling their outdated car models was the so-called Auto Center Point ‘sales event’ which was organized last weekend (15.10.2015) in the parking lot of Porto Cairo Mall.

Besides the lousy quality of the event and the unacceptable incompetence of the sales persons there, this event mainly proved one thing: That there is neither an automotive supply shortage nor a reason of a dramatic automotive price increase in Egypt caused by the so-called ‘dollar-crisis’!

This event showed and proved very well that this artificial shortage of automotive supply is created on purpose by the automotive dealers and importers in Egypt in order to increase their profit margins even more, without the need of investing any additional money in the capacity of their service centers, in the spare parts stock or in the training of their employees.

Instead, those greedy and ruthless dealers hide thousands of new cars in their storage areas in 6th of October City, Abou Rawash and 10th of Ramadan City in order to create an artificial shortage of cars in the market and keep the prices going up. In some cases, the over-price reached 5.000 LE, in others up to 10.000 or 30.000 LE. In some rare occasions the over-price reaches up to 100.000 LE like in the case of the locally-assembled Jeep Grand Cherokee, which, by the way, has a miserable assembly quality and suffers from many technical problems. I really wonder what some of those Grand Cherokee owners do for a living, which allows them to pay some (obviously easy-earned) 700.000 LE instead of the regular price of 600.000 LE without realizing that they are being ripped-off big-time.

Another indication that there is no dollar crises causing the automotive supply shortage in Egypt, is the fact that we did not hear about any massive lay-off procedures in the local automotive market, nor did we hear about any massive salary cuts for the employees, Marketing & PR Managers or the sales persons at the car dealers and car importers. Instead we find many car companies organizing lots of leisure trips, fun trips and shopping trips for the employees and some advertising representatives of the local automotive advertising newspaper supplements and other automotive ‘advertising’ media persons.

We at Auto Arabia and I personally encourage the Egyptian consumer and the Egyptian expats to participate in this automotive boycott campaign for at least 3-6 months, as this is the only way to teach those greedy car dealers and importers in Egypt that the consumer is the king in this equation and that the Egyptian consumer is tired of being ripped-off from those unprofessional and cold-blooded car dealers. Those dealers are not only harming the pockets of the Egyptian consumers but they are also harming the Egyptian economy.

Stay tuned here on autoarabia.org and on Nile TV International as we will follow the development of this boycott campaign very closely.

And this is the link on Facebook. Please join and share it!

https://www.facebook.com/5aleha.tesady?fref=photo

Mohamed Sheta
18.10.2015
Cairo