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Car Companies in China - A Summary

April 22, 2007 on 3:45 pm | In automobile purchase, New vehicles | No Comments

There has been a lot of talk lately about automobile manufacturers in China and their potential march to export in Europe and the US.  So I decided to do a quick summary of the various brands and manufacturers as a guide.

Chang’an Auto

Cherry

FAW (located in Changchun)

Dong Feng Group (located in Wuhan)
Geely (located in Taizhou)

Golden Dragon (located in Xiamen)

Huanghai (located in Liaoning province, currently developing SUV and light trucks)
King Long United Automotive Industry (located in Suzhou)
Then you have the joint ventures various manufacturers have in China

GM and VW have JVs in Shanghai

Toyota has a JV with FAW in Tianjin

BMW has a cooperation agreement and manufacturing with Brilliance Auto 
Ford and Honda have their own manufacturing plants in Guangzhou and Chongqing respectively.

To give you some idea about the scale of car sales in China, here are some statistics (from Xinhua agency):

• China car sales were at 1.54 million vehicles in Q1, 2007
• 1.12 million were sedans, while SUV were in the range of 71K vehicles
• The #1 spot is measured at 104.8K vehicles — sold by GM
• The #1 spot for single model was held by Santana - a VW model made in Shanghai.  (Keep in mind that the Santana is a tried and true model — When I first went to China in 1987 the Santana was already on the streets of Shanghai as a taxi cab vehicle)

As you can tell the automobile market in China is growing fast and is becoming a leading market worldwide.  How soon will the vehicles made in China find their way to the US market (they are already in Russia, Africa, Middle East) is tough to say, but that will happen.

Keep in mind also that the Geely and Cherry (Cherry makes the QQ) are in the range of US$4000 so they will definitely be striving to be a price leader soon enough.
    (two images  from  businessweek.com)