LatinNews Daily - 05 January 2024

*Brazil’s national federation of automobile dealers (Fenabrave) has released its figures for vehicle sales in December, showing that 400,020 new licence plate registrations were issued, a proxy for car sales. This marks an increase from the 361,222 plates registered in November and from the 366,883 registered in December 2022. This latest figure brings the total sales for 2023 to 4.11m vehicles, up from the 3.67m vehicles sold the previous year. In 2023, every vehicle category, except for trucks (-16.4%), saw an annual rise. The categories which saw the greatest increase from 2022 were motorcycles (+16.1%) and light commercial vehicles (+20.4%). In a Fenabrave press release, the federation’s president, José Maurício Andreta Júnior, is cited as attributing the higher sales figures for 2023 to a range of factors such as the federal government’s tax breaks for the sector, which were decreed last May, and the central bank (BCB) beginning the cycle of interest rate cuts, which began with the BCB’s monetary policy committee (Copom)’s rate cut decision last August.