Quote:
Originally posted by Perfectlap
clubhead,
is it easy to sell cars to Singapore from the U.S.? I mean if I buy cars at dealer auctions here in the USA and find sellers in Singapore I imagine I would be able to sell at a significant markup price?
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What Randall said is true. Most of the money goes to the government through heavy taxes. Couple of points to note :
1) Only RHD cars are allowed on the road
2) Only cars less than 3 years from date of manufacture can be registered for use on the road
3) The Customs tags a 'fair' price for the value of the vehicle which is normally the purchase price. This is known locally as the Open Market Value (OMV)
4) If the purchase price is deemed too low, the customs will jack up the value of the car to which they deemed is fair
5) Taxes are calculated based on this value (OMV)
The entire process is very transparent. For each vehicle on the road, you will know the OMV and hence, be a able to calculate the exact cost of the vehicle.
Because of the small market here, there is only 1 distributor for each brand of vehicle. Hence, in the past, the distributor were making huge profit per car. Then, wise guys like yourself (Known as parallel importers) came out with the idea of bringing or importing your own car into the country.
I personally did that myself. Managed to save a good US$30k for a car compared to what the dealers are asking.
But those days are over.... mostly. BMW however, are still commanding a huge premium with an M3 selling at easily US$50k margin or even more in some cases. The dynamics for that is too complicated so I won't go into it. Unfortunately, not the case for Porsche. Bringing a car in myself wil work out to be about the same amount as if I purchased from the dealer here.