Extra 800 new car plates aim to curb rising prices

With the aim of controlling new car plate prices, another 800 new car plates will be thrown into the pool for this month's auction, local authorities said on Tuesday, after plate prices hit a record high of 61,626 yuan ($9,782) last month.

The additional car plates will mean that a total of 9,300 plates will be up for grabs on May 19, roughly two hundred plates fewer than eight months ago, when the city sold the most new plates ever, according to Shanghai International Commodity Auction Company, the body in charge of the city's monthly car plate auction.

Last month, 22,706 people bid for 8,500 plates, pushing the price of a new car plate up to 61,626 yuan - a figure that rose for a fifth consecutive month and generated a total monthly revenue of 523.82 million yuan for the city.

The move to add more plates to this month's auction is suspected to have been prompted by the city's head of transportation, Sun Jianping, who told local media last week that Shanghai's policy of issuing car plates for sale rather than providing them for free like other Chinese cities, will help reduce growing traffic congestion problems in the city.

Local car plate dealers yesterday, meanwhile, had mixed reactions to the news. While some speculated that the move would help to drop plate prices by nearly 6 percent, or to roughly 58,000 yuan per plate, others predicted that the number of extra plates was not enough to impact the market - forecasting that prices would rise by up to another 2,000 yuan.

Since the start of the year, the city's new car plate prices have surged by 15.16 percent.