The Chinese auto market is expected to remain sluggish into 2020 with no signs of recovery, Bloomberg News reported Dec. 12, citing the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers.

The report said the industry body known as CAAM announced during a forecast summit held in Changsha that auto sales in China could fall 2% to 25.3 million in 2020, which would mark the third year of consecutive decline.

The biggest auto market in the world took a downturn for the first time in 2018, with sales dropping 2.8% to about 28.1 million units. Data from CAAM also showed that sales fell 9.1% year over year for the first 11 months in 2019 to 23.1 million units.

The forecast summit is a yearly event organized by CAAM. Last year, the industry group predicted that the market would be flat in 2019, with an estimated 28 million units sold.