Usa, Cina, auto Nyt 06-03-12
Grazie a Detroit, la Cina sarà in testa
KEITH BRADSHER
-
In Cina l’industria automobilistica si sta velocemente espandendo e
modernizzando; -
si è creato un mercato interno che chiede qualità ed
efficienza. -
La competizione per il mercato cinese ha modificato la
strategia dei grandi gruppi dell’auto, americani, europei (Ford, General
Motors, DaimlerChrysler and Volkswagen ) e giapponesi (Honda, Toyota, Nissan). -
Anziché produrre per esportare, mirano ora a vendere
sul mercato interno cinese. Honda però sta esportando piccole vetture dalla Cina
agli USA, DaimlerChrysler sta negoziando per costruire in Cina utilitarie da
vendere negli USA. -
Permane in Cina il vantaggio del costo del lavoro, con
salari di $200/mese; inoltre i costruttori cinesi ed esteri aprono nuovi stabilimenti
con management avanzato, in modo simile a quanto fecero i gruppi tedeschi e
giapponesi nel Sud degli USA, riuscendo a superare Detroit. -
La Cina si prepara a divenire, fra 4 anni, uno dei
maggiori esportatori di auto del mondo, con aumentata pressione sui giganti
attuali.
Mentre finora i grandi gruppi portavano Cina strutture
produttive obsolete, ora iniziano a introdurre la loro tecnologia più
aggiornata per modelli uguali a quelli delle metropoli di provenienza; devono
affrontare la crescente competitività dei produttori cinesi (Geely, Chery,
Lifan). Chery ha noleggiato società di design italiane.
Il gruppo Nanjing ha vinto al concorrenza di Sahnghai
Automotive per il controllo della britannica Rover e di Powertrain, per poi
trasferirla in Cina.
Lifan Group sta cercando di acquistare una joint venture di
DaimlerChrysler e BMW nel Sud Brasile.
I costruttori cinesi stanno imparando ad operare con
forniture just in time, riducendo il capitale in magazzino.
-
la giapponese Honda sta per introdurre in Cina la sua
più recente versione della Civic; -
Toyota assembla il suo motore a gasolio-elettricità
solo in Giappone e Cina; -
Ford ha aperto la seconda linea di produzione in Cina
(la prima 3 anni fa’) quasi identica a
uno dei più moderni stabilimenti quello di Saarlouis, Sud Germania, per la
produzione della Focus. Entro giugno la sua capacità di produzione giungerà a
200 000 auto/anno.
I produttori cinesi
hanno il 28,7% del mercato interno, è la prima volta che marchi cinesi
si pongono al primo posto.
I produttori giapponesi il 27,8%; europei 19%; USA 14%;
coreani 10,3%.
Nel 2005, le joint venture delle multinazionali hanno prodotto 2,3 mn. di veicoli ad uso
privato.
Le multinazionali come GM, Ford e Volkswagen continuano a operare
in Cina con partner cinesi perché il governo le obbliga a produrre in joint venture
50:50; solo Honda ha il 60% in uno stabilimento nel Guangzhou, che produce solo
per l’export.
Per giungere al 1° posto in Cina, le multinazionali
gareggiano a formare joint venture con i partner cinesi condividendo tecnologia
e competenze produttive.
-
General
Motors ha come partner la cinese Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation; -
Honda
con la joint venture con Dongfeng Motor Group, ha quadruplicato la capacità
produttiva nella città di Wuhan, a 120 000 auto/anno; -
Toyota
ha iniziato a metà dicembre 2005 l’assemblaggio di Prius a Changchun, nel Nord
Cina; la Cina è l’unico paese oltre il Giappone dove Toyota assembla il modello
Prius, il suo più importante modello dell’ultimo decennio;
Volkswagen intende sviluppare con Shanghai Automotive un minivan misto
per il mercato cinese, il che consentirà ai cinesi di acquisire la tecnologia tedesca.
Nyt 06-03-12
Thanks to Detroit, China
Is Poised to Lead
By KEITH
BRADSHER
CHONGQING, China
VOLKSWAGEN and other carmakers used to prosper by sending outdated
factory equipment to China
to produce older models no longer salable in the West.
– But competition has
become so fierce here that Honda is about to introduce its latest version of
the Civic only several months after it went on sale in Europe, Japan and the United States. Toyota,
meanwhile, is assembling its Prius gasoline-electric sedan only in Japan and China.
–
When Ford Motor opened its
first production line here in western China just three years ago, it used a layout copied from a Ford factory in the Philippines to produce 20,000 sedans a year
based on a small car design taken from Ford operations in India.
–
But this winter, Ford opened a second production line next
door that is practically identical to one of its most advanced factories, the
Saarlouis operation in southwestern Germany. The new line
produces the Focus, the same small car it builds in Germany (but different from the Focus sold in
the United States).
And with continuing improvements to the first line, it will bring total
capacity here to 200,000 cars a year by June.
The Chinese managers here are not even
satisfied with that. "I want to learn from Germany and then improve on
it," said Li Jianping, the factory’s vice director of manufacturing.
Ford’s success in rapidly expanding the
scale and sophistication of its Chongqing
operations illustrates how quickly the overall auto industry is expanding
and modernizing in China.
–
One requirement for a country to become an automobile
exporter is to develop a highly competitive domestic market that demands
excellent quality and efficiency, and China has managed to create just
such a market.
–
American and European
carmakers, including Ford, General Motors,
DaimlerChrysler and Volkswagen, as well as Toyota, Honda and Nissan of Japan
are introducing their best technology to their plants in China, and not
only to compete against one another. They also face rapidly growing competition
in the Chinese market from purely local companies like Geely, Chery and
Lifan.
–
These indigenous Chinese automakers captured 28.7 percent of
the market in January, the first time in many years that Chinese brands have been pre-eminent
— ahead of brands from Japan
(27.8 percent), Europe (19 percent), the United
States (14 percent) and South
Korea (10.3 percent), according to Automotive
Resources Asia, a consulting firm in Shanghai.
The multinationals "really have to
bring their latest models," said Yale Zhang, an analyst in the Shanghai office of CSM Worldwide, an auto consulting
company based in the Detroit
suburbs. "Even average consumers understand if this is not the latest
model."
–
Multinational joint ventures in
China
produced a total of 2.3 million family vehicles last year.
–
In the race to be No. 1 in China, the world’s fastest-growing car market, multinationals
from the United States, Japan and Europe
are falling over one another to share their latest designs, technology and
manufacturing expertise with Chinese partners. But industry experts say
that the sharing has helped China prepare to become a major car
exporter within four years, increasing the pressure on G.M., Ford and other
industry giants, which are already losing sales and market share to
foreign rivals.
Few auto executives now doubt that the
successful Chinese companies that emerge from the free-for-all in their home
country will be ready to tackle world markets. "I’ve seen the Chinese
vehicles in China from
various, various brands, and I’ve said it’s a threat that will come to the U.S., I think,
by the end of the decade," said Thomas W. LaSorda, Chrysler’s chief
executive.
– All of the multinationals rapidly expanding in China say that
their main goal lies in serving the Chinese market and not in exports. Still, Honda is already exporting small
cars from China to Europe,
while DaimlerChrysler is negotiating to build very small cars in China for sale in the United States, probably under the
Dodge brand.
–
Until the last few years, China’s main
advantages in the global auto manufacturing market
were in its cheap labor and its talent for copying older Western
designs, often while avoiding licensing fees, a practice that cut research and
development costs to almost nothing.
– Wages of less than $200 a month remain a big advantage for China, but it is developing another. Domestic and foreign
automakers are starting with clean slates to build new operations, using
efficient approaches and advanced management methods. It is similar to the way German and Japanese
companies built new and more efficient factories starting in the 1980’s, mostly
in the American South, helping them to leap beyond Detroit’s expertise.
–
G.M. and its local partner,
the Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation, built
an extensive vehicle design and engineering studio in Shanghai that has just finished a redesign of
the Buick LaCrosse for the Chinese market.
Raymond Bierzynski, the president of the
development center, said companies must bring their best technology here if
they are to build and sell the advanced models needed to compete in China. He
acknowledged that this "provides a training ground for local talents in
auto design and engineering for future sustainable development of China’s
automotive industry."
–
In the central city of Wuhan, Honda has just
finished quadrupling the capacity of its joint-venture factory with the
Dongfeng Motor Group, to 120,000 cars a year. It is
also starting to build the Civic there. The expansion, costing $350 million,
took just a year, half as long as a comparable expansion in the United States.
–
Perhaps most tellingly, on
Dec. 15 Toyota began assembling Prius hybrids in
the northern city of Changchun.
The world’s multinationals had long been leery of transferring proprietary
technology to make hybrid gasoline-electric engines in China, for fear
that it would be copied. While Toyota is still
cautious, China is
nonetheless the only place besides Japan
where Toyota is
assembling the Prius, arguably its most important car in a decade.
–
Furthermore, Volkswagen said in September that it would jointly develop a hybrid minivan
for the Chinese market with Shanghai
Automotive — a project that is likely to give the Chinese automaker a
significant understanding of the technology.
THE risk for the multinationals is that their inventions may be turned
against them. When G.M. followed Volkswagen into the
Chinese market in the mid-1990’s, it was assigned the same partner: Shanghai
Automotive, which announced plans on Feb. 23 to begin assembling and selling
its own brand of cars in China
while retaining the joint ventures. Other Chinese partners of multinationals
are expected to follow suit in the next several years.
G.M., Ford, Volkswagen and other
multinationals continue to work with Chinese partners because the government
here requires them to do so. Foreign companies must assemble cars in 50-50
joint ventures with local partners. Honda alone
has a 60 percent stake in a factory: a plant in Guangzhou that makes cars only for export.
–
Chinese automakers are also
buying modern technology and design themselves. Chery has hired some of the
best-known Italian auto design firms to spruce up its cars.
– When the MG Rover Group of Britain
entered bankruptcy proceedings last year, the Nanjing Automobile Group outbid Shanghai Automotive
to take control of Rover and its fairly modern engine-producing subsidiary, Powertrain
Ltd., and move it to China.
–
The Lifan Group, a car and motorcycle maker with headquarters several miles from
the Ford plant here, is bidding to buy one of the world’s most advanced
engine factories, a joint venture of DaimlerChrysler and BMW in southern Brazil.
But running efficient factories can
often be even more important than buying the latest,
most expensive robots. The Hafei Group, an automaker in Harbin in northern
China, discovered this when it installed expensive European and Japanese
automated equipment four years ago, only to find that its disorderly factory
layout was less efficient and less flexible than its aging factory next door,
where workers used hammers and other hand tools in smoky air.
Inventory control is another matter. Many
Chinese auto factories keep extensive, costly stockpiles of parts on hand,
whereas new Western-designed factories, including the engine operation in
southern Brazil,
are designed to receive frequent but small shipments from suppliers. Chinese
manufacturers are now learning from their Western partners how to operate with
this just-in-time delivery of parts.
The best way to appreciate how car
manufacturing in China
has changed is to look at the Ford factory here, a 50-50 joint venture with the
Chongqing Chang’an Automobile Company. The first production line was supposed
to be simple, relying heavily on manual labor and producing a sturdy Fiesta
sedan of older design. Teams of local managers and workers were sent to the Philippines and India to learn the craft.
But the second line now includes robots
to weld the stiff bodies of the Focus sedans for a more precise ride. Another
robot applies the adhesive that holds the windshield in place, as in Germany. One
small difference is that a robot guides the windshield into place in Germany, while people do so here, said Mr. Li,
whom Ford sent to Germany
for four weeks to study the system there.
Wang Cheng-guo, a strapping 23-year-old
with a two-year degree in computer hardware from a technical college, started
working at the Ford factory in 2004. Each day, he had to strain to lift
50-pound seats by hand into sedans on the first production line here.
Mr. Wang said that with five eight-hour
days a week and pay that has now reached nearly $200 a month, the job
nonetheless looked good to him when compared with his father’s job at a nearby
Chang’an car factory. His father, 48, has worked from 7 a.m. until 11 p.m. at
that factory, with few vacations, for almost 30 years. While his father still
pushes racks of parts to the assembly line, the son earns more, even with a
much shorter schedule.
"When I was young, I rarely saw
him," said Mr. Wang, who with his first Ford paycheck bought his mother a
thick green winter coat and took his parents to a traditional spicy dinner of
Chongqing hot pot.
Three months after Mr. Wang joined the
factory, Ford improved the first production line by installing an electrical
boom to help him swing the seats into the cars. When he concluded that the boom
made a time-consuming pivot in the wrong direction and asked that it swing into
the car from a different angle, local managers soon made the change — an
adjustment that might have languished for months in more bureaucratic factories
in other countries.
Mr. Wang, recently engaged, is now
making all sorts of plans, the kind that millions of Chinese want to make as
prices fall and technology improves. "I want to get married," he
said, "and get a car someday."
Jeremy W. Peters contributed reporting
from Detroit
for this article.
The New York