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A Deeper Look into Malaysia Vehicles' Industry
Storytelling Using DATA with Visualization

Traffic congestion is considered a major problem in Malaysia especially in Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia. So, I always have a question in mind since I was young, why do traffic jams often occur in Kuala Lumpur?
Is it because of the road condition? Maybe… but I think maybe there is a larger factor contributing to this problem. As we know before we tackle any problem, understand the whole picture should be the main priority. Hence, today I will give u some overview of the vehicle’s market, in the following post, I will go deeper to find out the answer.
If you enjoy my story, please follow me and I will try my best to produce better content.
Without further ado, let’s start!
Passenger Vehicles
Passenger Vehicles (PV) include Passenger Cars (PC), Window Vans (WV), Multi-Purpose Vehicles (MPV) and also Four Wheel Drive/Sports Utility Vehicles (4x4/SUV).

Base on the first half report 2019 from the Malaysia Automotive Association (MAA) on the top 20 brands for PV vehicles, Perodua accounts for around 45.2% share of Total Industry Volume (TIV), while Honda and Proton share quite evenly around 16% each. Thus, you can notice that the top 3 brands already account for 77.7% of the total market share.
The screenshot above shows the top 4 cheapest cars which you can find in Malaysia. One of the reasons for Perodua to own the largest market share in Malaysia PV vehicles is it provides the cheapest car.
Based on the Malaysian Employers Federation study in 2018, if you are a fresh graduate holding an Honours degree, the average salary is only RM2169 per month.
Let’s say you are earning the average salary and you want to buy a Perodua Axia. You need to pay a downpayment of 10%. Now, assuming your car loan’s interest rate is 4% and repayment year to be 5 years. So, you will need to fork out around RM413 per month, which already accounts for around 19% of your salary. In this scenario, you can see that as a fresh graduate, to afford the cheapest car is indeed a huge burden.
In conclusion, having the most affordable price for the vehicle industry in Malaysia might be one of the important factors to grab the market share.
Commercial Vehicles
Whereas for Commercial Vehicles (CV), which includes Panel Vans (PV), Pick Ups (PU), Trucks, Prime Movers (PM) and Bus.
According to the report released by Malaysian Automotive Association (MAA), Isuzu Malaysia Sdn Bhd maintained its top position for the fifth year in a row as the nation’s preferred CV brand for 2018.
Despite Isuzu having its nation’s preferred commercial vehicle badge, Toyota still has Hilux to maintain its top market share position in CV, which accounts for 37.3% among the top 20 brands.

Supply and Demand

The snapshot above shows the total sales and production units in Malaysia automotive market. It is quite obvious that there is a spike between June 2018 to August 2018 where I highlighted using a red box.
If you are aware of MalaMalaysia’ss, this is actually because of Malaysia’s prime minister Tun Mahathir’s action of reintroducing Sales and Service Tax (SST) and set Goods and Services Tax (GST) standard rate to 0%.
As Malaysian knows, December could be said as one of the best months to buy cars, as more companies are offering year-end sales, but from what I could observe here, Tun Mahathir’s action’s effect already surpasses the effect of seasonality.
Final Thoughts

I appreciate your patience for reading till the end and I hope this could be a good introduction for you to the vehicles market in Malaysia.
If you are interested in the code or the dataset which I have collected, do comment below and I will clean the code and send it to you.
This post is originated from: https://towardsdatascience.com/a-deeper-look-into-malaysia-vehicles-industry-c114fda97d36
About the Author
Low Wei Hong is a Data Scientist at Shopee. His experiences involved more on crawling websites, creating data pipeline and also implementing machine learning models on solving business problems.
He provides crawling services that can provide you with the accurate and cleaned data which you need. You can visit this website to view his portfolio and also to contact him for crawling services.