US car giant General Motors Corp (GM) plans to invest US$12 billion in China from this year to 2017 and build more plants next year as it competes with aggressive rivals in the world’s largest auto market.
GM expects its China sales to expand by 8 to 10 percent this year, in line with the overall growth of the Chinese market, where foreign firms, such as Volkswagen AG (VW), and domestic players like SAIC Motor Corp (上海汽車) vie for more market share.
“We are investing wisely and accelerating our vehicle development and manufacturing to keep pace with market demand. In total we are investing US$12 billion between 2014 and 2017,” GM China president Matt Tsien (錢惠康) said at the Auto China show in Beijing.
GM plans to build five more plants in China next year, as part of its efforts to ramp up manufacturing capacity there by 65 percent by 2020, executives said on Sunday.
Rival Volkswagen’s early entry into China focused on rapidly developing eastern provinces — now it plans to push into the west.
VW’s luxury division, Audi, will target smaller megacities in central and western provinces to raise the number of dealerships by about half to 500 in the next three years, chief executive Rupert Stadler said.
“That’s where new business is emerging, where things get rolling,” Stadler said at the Beijing show. “We don’t need more dealers in Beijing and Shanghai.”
China’s auto market is forecast to expand by 8 to10 percent this year, slightly slowing from last year when it sold 21.98 million vehicles, up 13.9 percent from a year earlier.
Vehicle density in China’s smaller cities offers lucrative growth prospects.
The average number of cars per 1,000 inhabitants in Yaan, a city of about 2 million in central Sichuan Province is 18, compared with 123 in first-tier coastal cities Shanghai and Guangzhou, according to VW’s Web site.
VW was one of the first global automakers to launch production in China during the 1980s and is evolving its operations in the country by pushing west.
“A large sales potential for passenger cars will develop there fairly quickly,” Jochem Heizmann, head of VW’s China operations, told reporters. “That’s one factor driving growth besides state-induced urbanization.”
VW, which last year opened factories in the western cities Chengdu and Urumqi, is counting on double-digit market growth to increase group deliveries to a record of more than 3.5 million this year, from 3.27 million last year, CEO Martin Winterkorn said.
China’s auto market rose 13.9 percent to 21.98 million vehicles last year, compared with a 7.6 percent gain in the US to 15.6 million.
Wolfsburg-based VW, having eclipsed GM last year as the top-selling foreign brand in China, aims to consolidate its lead with aggressive spending.
Its two joint venture partners, First Automotive Works (第一汽車) and Shanghai Volkswagen, are planning to spend 18.2 billion euros (US$25.2 billion) through 2018, the year VW has pledged to take the global car-sales crown, on models, technologies and plants.
GM’s five new Chinese plants will be in Wuhan, Chongqing, Jinqiao and Shenyang. Four of those will be vehicle assembly plants, while the fifth one will be an engine plant in Shenyang.
The Jinqiao plant will make its flagship Cadillac sedans. GM aims to sell 100,000 by next year in China, rising from roughly 50,000 last year, executives said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained