China's passenger vehicle sales continued to recover in August, with the third-highest year-on-year growth in 20 months, making analysts raise their forecasts for full year sales in 2012.Â
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Total sales of cars, sport-utility vehicles, multi-purpose vehicles and minivans increased 11.2 percent over last year to 1,158,921 units in August, according to figures from the China Passenger Car Association.Â
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They mean that in the first eight months of the year, 9,205,675 passenger vehicles were sold in the world's largest automobile market, an increase of 6.4 percent year-on-year.Â
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"The continued uptrend of the market in August was expected. But the increasing production of energy-saving vehicles, in response to both market demand and the government policy, acted as a catalyst for sales," said Rao Da, secretary-general of the association.Â
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He said that he expected the sales momentum to continue in September, helped by the recently launched policy of free tolls on highways during the approaching week-long National Day holiday, which should help attract more consumers to showrooms before October.Â
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"That will greatly ease the impact of expected fuel price hikes in September," said Rao.Â
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"We also expect that China's GDP will recover from September, which makes us confident to raise our growth forecast for this year from negative to 7 percent year-on-year."Â
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He said that although the commercial vehicle sector will remain at its current negative growth of 5 percent from a year earlier, he expected total automobile sales in 2012 to hit 19.3 million units from last year's 18.5 million units.Â