Singapore

THE declines in Certificate of Entitlement (COE) premiums for passenger cars over the last few months appear to have gotten customers and their pocketbooks into showrooms.

In the first round of bidding for August, COE premiums for passenger cars largely halted their slide on Wednesday.

The COE premium for Category A - cars below 1,600cc and 130 hp - inched up S$320 to S$56,209. A bigger increase was seen for Cat B - cars above 1,600cc or 130 hp - with the premium coming in S$2,680 higher at S$60,789.

Interestingly, the premium for Cat E, the open category that tracks Cat B, fell S$2,216 to S$57,885 - a long way from its peak of S$79,500 in April.

The uptick in premiums for Cat A and Cat B was not particularly surprising for the car trade, given how premiums for both categories had reached their lowest for the first seven months of the year in the previous round of bidding.

"A lot of people were waiting for the right time to buy," said Nicholas Wong, general manager of Kah Motor, noting that the showroom has seen a lot of action in recent weeks.

Over at Volkswagen, this was also the case. "The 11 per cent drop in the Category B premium during the last round of COE bidding definitely gave car showroom traffic a big boost," said Daniel Chong, general manager, sales, at Volkswagen Group Singapore. "We saw very strong buyer interest in the new Passat over the last fortnight, even though the car will only be officially launched this Friday."

The COE premium for goods vehicles and buses, Cat C, slipped S$700 to S$49,302, while the premium for motorcycles, Cat D, fell S$111 to S$6,201.

All in, 5,368 bids were received for the quota of 3,647 available COEs. The latest round of bidding is also the first one since the larger COE quota kicked in for the August-October period, with an allowance of 21,845 COEs, or 7,281 for each month.

Analyse historical COE data with the Business Times' interactive tool