SHANGHAI, Dec 8: China’s passenger car sales fell 10.3 per cent in November from a year earlier as stalling economic growth sapped consumer confidence, state media reports said on Monday.

It was the third month out of four that car sales have contracted on an annual basis in the world’s second-largest auto market. Sales rose in October.

Auto sales for January-November rose 8.9 per cent from the same period a year earlier to 6.16 million units, the official Xinhua News Agency and other state media cited the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers as saying.

That compared with an 18.5 per cent increase in passenger car sales in 2007.

Chinese consumers are increasingly feeling the pinch from the global financial crisis, and cutting back on auto purchases and other discretionary spending, J.P. Morgan economist Frank Gong said in a briefing on Monday.

“People are losing high paying jobs which are being replaced by low-paying jobs in construction,” Gong said. “Auto sales will continue to slow down,” he said.

Sales of passenger cars in November totalled 522,800 units, down 2.9 per cent from the previous month and down 10.3 per cent from the same month in 2007. Sales in October rose 8.4 per cent from a year earlier, the industry group said.

Sales of sedans fell almost 11 per cent to 389,600 units compared with a year earlier, while sales of multipurpose vehicles dropped 30 per cent to 14,400 units. Sports utility vehicle sales fell 3.6 per cent from the year before, to 35,000 units, it said.

Dongfeng Nissan, a joint venture between Japan’s Nissan Motor Co. and local automaker Dongfeng Motor Co., was among the few automakers to see sales rise: Its passenger car sales rose 60 per cent in November from a year earlier to 33,417 units, the report said.

Most other major automakers saw double-digit declines in sales. That included Shanghai GM, General Motors Corp.’s joint venture with Shanghai Automotive Industrial Corp., whose sales fell 35 per cent in November from a year earlier to 29,469 units, the report said.

While GM, Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler automakers plead for billions of dollars in help from the US government, China’s own car manufacturers are also looking for ways to weather the slump in demand.

Most Chinese automakers are state-owned companies that enjoy a degree of support from their local government owners. They also benefit from requirements that foreign automakers producing for the local market operate through joint ventures controlled by Chinese partners.

China’s Export and Import Bank agreed Sunday to give Chery Automobile Co., a partner with Chrysler LLC and one the country’s biggest automakers, a loan of 10 billion yuan ($1.5 billion) to help support its international expansion, reports said on Monday. —AP