STOCKHOLM - Volvo, the world's second biggest truck maker, said on Tuesday its deliveries fell 37 percent in November on a year ago, and down 7 percent on the previous month, with no signs yet of an upturn.

The global financial crisis last year pulled the plug on demand for commercial vehicles as years of easy credit for funding truck purchases dried up and major economies across the world tumbled into recession.

Heavy-duty truck markets have since pulled out of the free-fall experienced around the turn of the year amid signs that the global economy is on the mend, but a return to the booming sales of recent years remained a distant prospect.

The first impression is that this is pretty much in line with October. We've reached bottom, but there is not really any substantial recovery yet, Evli analyst Michael Andersson said.

The deliveries troughed in July/August at extremely low figures and have since edged up and stabilised around 12,000 to 13,000 units, but that is still very far from recent peaks.

Sales of passenger cars this year have been spurred by incentive schemes, powering a 26.6 percent rise in European auto sales in November, separate data showed on Tuesday. But no similar schemes exist for the commercial vehicles industry.

Volvo, which sells trucks under the Renault, Nissan Diesel, Mack and Eicher brands as well as its own name, said deliveries last month were down 45 percent on a year ago in Europe, its biggest market, while they fell 35 percent in North America.

In Asia, shipments of the Swedish group's heavy-duty trucks fell 33 percent from a year earlier.

Volvo, the world's second biggest heavy truck maker after Germany's Daimler has forecast that the European truck market will have halved this year while the already weak North American market contracts a further 30-40 percent. (Additional reporting by Oskar von Bahr; Editing by Greg Mahlich)

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