Seat’s China goal is relatively easy

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Seat’s sales for China in 2012 has been set at 4,000 units, this is not exactly an ambitious goal for SEAT in their starting year. China is the largest car market in the world, and some models are claiming sales of 4000 units per week so obviously there is plenty of scope for Seat to enter China.

Seat’s Leon formula racing, Leon Cupra, and Ibiza will be imported to China next year. Although they are positioned as high-end hot-hatches, it wont be too hard for the 3 models to match the sales of local produced Golf GTI, which itself sold around 4000 units in China during 2010. Pricing will be a key factor to gain early sales, the Golf GTI is priced 230k RMB (1 euro=8.6 RMB now), Seat should be setting its prices at 180 to 250k if they want to win sales

SEAT is not very famous in China, but VW’s brand image is very strong in China, as a part of VW, I believe Seat will be accepted by most Chinese consumers very quickly – just like a new model of VW. Looking back to four years ago, when Skoda hit the Chinese market as a branch of Shanghai-VW, Chinese people accepted it very quickly and helped Skoda become one of the fastest growing brands in China. Many Chinese young people like sportive cars now, and there are already many welcomed models in this open niche market, like Golf GTI, Buick Excelle XT, Regal and the MG6. However, the suspension shouldn’t be to aggressive, since the poorer Chinese road condition..

Domestic production must be in Seat’s future if they want to excel in China. All brands with 40,000 sales, rather than 4,000 have made some models in China, let alone SEAT shares powertrains and platforms with many domestically produced VWs and Skodas. Because Chinese people don’t know too much about the European domestic markets and even if they know, they do not care about it a great deal. Many average brands can be rebuilt as luxury brands, take for example GAP, Haagen-Dazs, Starbucks etc – these are middle of the road brands in Western countries, but they have been repackaged as more ‘premium’ brands in China. So, with a good marketing, Chinese people will like Seat and accept its sportive and higher positioning.