Record year for Skoda in 2006

Happy New Year from Skoda! At least it will be if it’s as successful as the past 12 months. To say 2006 was “fruitful” for us would be like saying the England cricket team’s performance was “a little disappointing” on the recent Ashes Tour.

Last year saw Skoda perform better than ever before. For example, we sold almost 39,000 cars in a 12 month period for the first time. This bonanza saw our UK market share increase to 1.7%. Overall, Skoda sales were up 8% on the previous year, despite the wider British new car market seeing a downturn of 5%.

A major contributor to this success has been the new generation Octavia. Nearly 17,900 were sold in the UK last year – around 2,000 of which wore the highly acclaimed vRS badge. Despite being in its final year, the plucky current generation Fabia is also still going strong. Just under 18,000 found homes in Britain in 2006 – 2,600 of which were hot hatch vRS versions. Skoda also sold over 2,000 Superbs last year and nearly 800 Roomsters since the compact MPV’s launch at the end of September.

International production rocketed to over 500,000 units. This is an incredible achievement given that in 1995 Skoda only built around 208,000 cars. That means in little more than a decade output has risen by 140%.

Skoda now produces cars in five countries: the Czech Republic, Bosnia and Herzegovina, India, Kazakhstan and the Ukraine. Operations are also scheduled to start in China and Russia later this year.