SHANGHAI: Auto sales in China, the world's largest car market, rose by 5.36 percent in March from a year earlier, data from an industry group showed Sunday.
A total of 1.83 million vehicles were sold in the country last month, the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers (CAAM) said in a statement.
That brought total sales in the first three months of the year to 4.98 million units, up 4.98 percent from a year earlier, the group said.
Growth in passenger car sales which account for most of the country's auto sales is expected to slow this year due to measures imposed by some major cities to restrict the number of vehicles on the road, plus the withdrawal of policies that encouraged car purchases.
Passenger vehicle sales rose 6.52 percent from a year earlier to 1.35 million units last month, the association said.
China overtook the United States in 2009 to become the world's biggest car market.
Auto sales in the country rose more than 32 percent last year to a record 18.06 million units as the economy quickly powered out of the financial crisis.
With economic overheating now a growing concern, the government has phased out policy incentives such as subsidies for purchases of small-engine cars.
Some cities, including Beijing and Shanghai, have even introduced measures such as annual quotas of new car number-plates to restrict purchases as part of efforts to ease chronic gridlock and control air pollution.
In Beijing, there were 28 applicants for every licence plate that will be issued in April as 491,671 people vied for 17,600 plates in the monthly lottery, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
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