Unsold Japanese Cars Pile Up at Swedish Port

JAPANESE car maker Toyota has leased a cargo ship to store 2500 unsold cars at the Swedish port of Malmoe, where parking lots are already full due to plunging car sales, a port official said today.
“The Swedish-Norwegian company Wallenius Wilhelmsen has reached an agreement with Toyota to let them use the Morning Glory cargo ship to store some cars, and we load and unload the cars,” Bart Steijaert, in charge of car stocks at the Malmoe harbour, said.
More than 30,000 cars of all brands are currently piling up in the port, including the 2500 on board the 195-metre Morning Glory. The port has a maximum capacity of around 27,500 cars, Mr Steijaert said.
A new parking lot is being built at the port to provide more space for cars and is due to be completed in April.
“Since last summer, we’ve had a lot of cars in the harbour and we started to lack parking areas as the car sales dropped dramatically, and then the vessel arrived on January 7,” Mr Steijaert said.
Car sales have come to a screeching halt around the world since the global economic crisis erupted late last year, leading to an overload of stocks.
In Sweden, only 14,603 cars were sold in February, a drop of 31.3 per cent from the same month a year earlier, statistics showed.