US auto giant Ford Motor Co and its Chinese partners said yesterday that sales rose a record 44 percent year-on-year last year, with more than 440,000 vehicles sold.
Ford’s passenger car joint-venture in China, Changan Ford Mazda Automobile (長安福特馬自達汽車), sold 315,791 units last year, an increase of 55 percent over the previous year, the company said in a statement.
The joint venture’s sales were boosted by tax cuts on small engine vehicles that strengthened demand for the Focus compact car and the Fiesta subcompact, the US automaker said.
Sales at Ford’s commercial vehicle joint venture, Jiangling Motors Corp (江鈴汽車), totaled 114,688 units, rising 21 percent from 2008, it said.
Ford is increasingly looking to China for growth after a major restructuring and is also in talks with Chinese carmaker Geely (吉利) over the sale of its Swedish brand Volvo.
China overtook the US a year ago to become the largest car market in the world, boosted by Beijing’s efforts to stimulate domestic consumption.
Auto sales for the first 11 months of the year reached 12.23 million units, the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers said.
Market leader and fellow US carmaker, General Motors (GM), announced this week it sold a record 1.83 million vehicles in China last year, and expressed optimism for even better results this year.
GM’s results marked a 66.9 percent sales jump year-on-year.
Volkswagen (VW), the biggest European carmaker, also reported yesterday that sales in China hit a record 1.4 million vehicles last year.
The figure represented a leap of 36.7 percent from the 2008 figure of 1.02 million, it said in a statement, adding that “2009 has been an extraordinary year.
“The automotive market went beyond everybody’s expectations,” it said.
The group sold 1.12 million VW brand cars in China, along with nearly 159,000 high-end Audi models and 122,500 less expensive Skodas.
“We are full of confidence for 2010 [and] expecting a growth rate of 10 to 15 percent for the total automotive market in China,” said Winfried Vahland, president and chief executive of Volkswagen Group China.
Last year, the group also sold 600 so-called supercars in China, including 484 Bentleys and 118 Lamborghinis.
VW owns 10 brands in all, including its most recently acquired one, Porsche.
Quanta Computer Inc (廣達) chairman Barry Lam (林百里) is expected to share his views about the artificial intelligence (AI) industry’s prospects during his speech at the company’s 37th anniversary ceremony, as AI servers have become a new growth engine for the equipment manufacturing service provider. Lam’s speech is much anticipated, as Quanta has risen as one of the world’s major AI server suppliers. The company reported a 30 percent year-on-year growth in consolidated revenue to NT$1.41 trillion (US$43.35 billion) last year, thanks to fast-growing demand for servers, especially those with AI capabilities. The company told investors in November last year that
United Microelectronics Corp (UMC, 聯電) forecast that its wafer shipments this quarter would grow up to 7 percent sequentially and the factory utilization rate would rise to 75 percent, indicating that customers did not alter their ordering behavior due to the US President Donald Trump’s capricious US tariff policies. However, the uncertainty about US tariffs has weighed on the chipmaker’s business visibility for the second half of this year, UMC chief financial officer Liu Chi-tung (劉啟東) said at an online earnings conference yesterday. “Although the escalating trade tensions and global tariff policies have increased uncertainty in the semiconductor industry, we have not
Intel Corp has named Tasha Chuang (莊蓓瑜) to lead Intel Taiwan in a bid to reinforce relations between the company and its Taiwanese partners. The appointment of Chuang as general manager for Intel Taiwan takes effect on Thursday, the firm said in a statement yesterday. Chuang is to lead her team in Taiwan to pursue product development and sales growth in an effort to reinforce the company’s ties with its partners and clients, Intel said. Chuang was previously in charge of managing Intel’s ties with leading Taiwanese PC brand Asustek Computer Inc (華碩), which included helping Asustek strengthen its global businesses, the company
Power supply and electronic components maker Delta Electronics Inc (台達電) yesterday said it plans to ship its new 1 megawatt charging systems for electric trucks and buses in the first half of next year at the earliest. The new charging piles, which deliver up to 1 megawatt of charging power, are designed for heavy-duty electric vehicles, and support a maximum current of 1,500 amperes and output of 1,250 volts, Delta said in a news release. “If everything goes smoothly, we could begin shipping those new charging systems as early as in the first half of next year,” a company official said. The new
RSS