Shanghai (ZXZC)- On Friday, SAIC Motor announced its annual financial performance expectation. The automaker said the net profit attributable to shareholders was about RMB 34.2 billion, exceeding that of the previous year by RMB 2.2 billion and increasing 7 percent year on year.

After deduction of extraordinary earnings and losses, the net profit attributable to shareholders grew by 7.8 percent year on year to RMB 32.7 billion, 2.4 billion more than that of 2016.

The company owed its profit growth to the good sales performance. In the first half of 2017, the sales of SAIC grew by 5.8 percent from a year earlier to 3.175 million units. During the same period, the automaker achieved a sales volume of RMB 39.64 billion and its net profit was up nearly 6 percent to RMB 15.96 billion, more than the total volume of Dongfeng Motor and GAC.

As the vehicle purchasing rate shall return to 10 percent from the beginning of 2018, consumers may take the last several months to buy vehicles with a relatively lower cost. What’s more, SAIC also introduced many promotional activities in the second half of the year. All of these factors contribute to its outstanding sales performance and the sales of the latter half of the year were much more than the volume of the first half. In the whole year, SAIC managed to realize a year-on-year sales growth of 6.8 percent in 2017, with a total delivery of 6.93 million vehicles.