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Bidder numbers down at monthly license plate sale
Print Edition
AFTER soaring to an all-time high in July, the number of participants in yesterday’s car plate auction in Shanghai fell for the first time this year.
The number of bidders dropped 10.7 percent from last month to 121,550, while the number of plates available remained unchanged at 7,400. The municipal government has set a quota to sell 100,000 license plates this year.
The drop in participants also led to an increase in the success rate, which rose to 6.1 percent, from 5.4 percent in July, after four months in decline.
Meanwhile, the average price of the plates fell 895 yuan (US$146), or 1.2 percent, to 73,785 yuan, with the lowest winning bid down 1,000 yuan, or 1.3 percent, from July at 73,600 yuan.
The government’s price ceiling, set at 72,600 yuan for first round bids, has been key to keeping selling prices stable this year.
Once a person has placed an initial bid — of up to the ceiling price — they can raise it in the second round, but only by a maximum of 300 yuan. As most people hold out until the final seconds to enter their bids, there is huge demand on the servers that process the bids.
“It’s very hard to get a plate in Shanghai,” said Fiona Fang, who yesterday went home empty-handed for the third month in a row.
“It’s not a matter of money, but luck,” she said.
“There were rumors in the past that Shanghai car plates were going to become more difficult to acquire,” said Eddie Zhang, a car dealer in Shanghai.
“That created panic and led to a self-fulfilling prophecy,” he said.
“But with the introduction of a series of policies to control the number of participants, the situation has got a lot better.”
Since July, only people already in possession of a driving license are allowed to participate in the auctions. Similarly, since June, people holding only a temporary residence permit for Shanghai — a group that once accounted for about 10 percent of bidders — have also been excluded from the sales.
If a policy to consolidate the sale of new and used license plates comes into force, many more people, especially scalpers, will be forced out of the auction, Zhang said.
As a result of the low success rate among people bidding for new plates, second-hand ones generally sell for up to 50,000 yuan more. The huge price gap means that many people attending the monthly auctions are there simply to try and make a quick profit.
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