SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Honda Motor Co Ltd (T:7267) and its two local joint ventures sold 52,513 automobiles in China in August, down 5.5 percent from a year earlier, the Japanese automaker said on Tuesday.
That follows a 22.7 percent year-on-year fall in July and a 15.8 percent increase in June.
Natsuno Asanuma, Honda's Beijing-based spokeswoman, said the decline in August sales was due to dealers adjusting their inventory ahead of planned launches of key models this year.
Carmakers often cut down on inventories at their dealers to make room for new models.
Honda is due to release the Vezel and the Spirior in November and the XR-V towards the end of the year, Asanuma said.
The company's sales in the first eight months of the year came to 445,472 vehicles, up 5.2 percent from the same period a year earlier.
Honda will double the number of car models it sells in China over the next two years to increase its market share, Japan's Nikkei newspaper reported in May.
Honda, which operates car ventures in China with Dongfeng Motor Group Co Ltd (HK:0489) and Guangzhou Automobile Group Co Ltd (HK:2238) (SS:601238), aims to sell 900,000 cars in the country this year, up 18.9 percent from a year earlier.
(Reporting by Adam Jourdan and Kazunori Takada in SHANGHAI and Norihiko Shirouzu in BEIJING; Editing by Miral Fahmy)