No Threat From Chinese Car Exports
For the past years, auto makers in Europe and the U.S. looked to China with hope, and with trepidation. They hoped the booming Chinese market would lift their worldwide sales. It did. They feared the Chinese would export cars en masse, swamping Europe and the U.S. with cheap vehicles. They did not.
If you can’t crush ‘em, crash ‘em: Alarm was sounded each time a Chinese car manufacturer announced their attendance of an auto show in Frankfurt, Geneva, Paris, or Detroit. weapons of mass destruction were used to repel the Chinese invasion: Chinese cars were crashed, and ghastly results were published, sometimes right before those auto shows. An insider said: “If you have the cash, you can crash a lot of cars. There’s always one crash that looks real bad. Those are the ones you’ll see on YouTube.”
Market crash: This year, terrifying crashes of Chinese cars were conspicuously absent before the Paris Auto Show. Maybe it was because Edmund’s AutoObserver reported from the show: “The era of Chinese car exports may have ended before it even began.”
There was no Chinese invasion this time. Only two Chinese auto companies made it to the show. One was Brilliance, BMW’s joint venture partner in China. The other was the French distributor of Shuanghuan Automobile. In previous years, they threw the auto makers in a tizzy. Their cars had been crashed mercilessly. This year, they were treated as if they weren’t there.
No cars needed to be crashed this time. The auto markets did the crashing. Auto sales in the U.S. went down 26 percent in September. In Japan, car sales are at their lowest level in more than thirty years. European markets are faltering.
Chinese new car exports sink: Chinese new car export numbers confirm this trend. August 2008 saw the first monthly drop over recent years in China’s car exports, largely due to slowing demand overseas. According to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers (CAAM), China exported 44,400 motor vehicles in August 2008, down 22.18 % from the previous month, or 11.29 % from a year earlier. Analysts think this trend will accelerate when the full impact of the market crash will be felt.
In 2007, China had exported a total of 612,700 vehicles, up 78.95 % from a year earlier. For the first eight months, the total Chinese auto export value rose 36.5 percent year-on-year. Experts expect a decline for the rest of the year.
Parts do better: For auto parts, the picture is better. Sure, according to Gasgoo , Chinese parts makers who focused on making OEM parts for foreign new car manufacturers, saw their sales “drop significantly this year.”
Manufacturers who target the after-sales market fare much better, with many people preferring to maintain cars rather than buying new ones. The semi-official newspaper China Daily said: “The US and the European customers’ preference for China-made auto parts, which are more competitive in price, provides much better opportunities.
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