SAIC to spend $1.5 billion USD on own brand models
The MG brand is still lagging behind Roewe in the sales charts, but with $1.5 billion USD to blow through in branding investment, MG might just rise from the ashes in China, Europe and beyond this coming year.
From Reuters:
Top Chinese automaker SAIC Motor Corp (600104.SS) plans to invest 10 billion yuan ($1.51 billion) in its production base in the eastern city of Nanjing in the next five years to boost capacity of its own-brand cars, the China Securities Journal said.
By 2015, the facility where SAIC’s Roewe and MG sedans are made will have an annual capacity of 1 million units, the newspaper said over the weekend.
SAIC is the only Chinese automaker that has managed to make some inroads in the country’s lucrative medium-higher end segment dominated by General Motors (GM.N), Volkswagen (VOWG.DE) and the likes.
In the first 11 months, it sold a total of 146,563 Roewe and MG cars, up 78 percent from a year earlier, company data showed.
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I’d say that the MG brand has a better chance of making it overseas than “Roewe”.
$1.5 billion is not a lot of money in auto industry. Ssangyong was asking $1 billion for the R&D of 4 models and SAIC couldn’t come up with this cash.
All the global auto majors spend $6~10 billlion a year on R&D alone.
@IHC
Your point is? Did anyone state it was “a lot”?
@ Ed
Chinese automakers cannot compete with foreign automakers due to lack of cash.
The pie is still big enough that they don’t have to….. If you haven’t noticed it’s the JV’s that are now shifting their attention to compete with the Chinese brands in the economy market, something they largely ignored until now.
If you’d known anything about the Chinese car industry, then you would know that one thing SAIC doesn’t lack is cash. SAIC is doing just fine.