Can China Save GM?

[pontiac4ever]

Article from Forbes
On the congested streets of Shanghai, where drivers pay no heed to painted lane stripes, Buicks jockey for position with Toyotas, Audis and Volkswagens, honking as they maneuver through traffic made worse by the city's frenetic development.
But away from China's traditional wealth centers, in cities like Kunming and Zhengzhou and in vast rural areas, the roads are populated by entirely different vehicles: bicycles, scooters and Western knockoff cars bearing the badges of obscure Chinese brands.
One vehicle is ubiquitous throughout the Chinese countryside: the Wuling Sunshine. Reminiscent of a 1960s-era VW "hippie bus"--but half the size--the Sunshine is the vehicle of choice for China's small business owners and farmers, who use it to haul everything from electronics to sugarcane.
Priced as low as $4,500 [[about 7% above its Chinese competition) and topping out around $9,000, the no-frills Sunshine is by far China's bestselling vehicle, with 597,000 purchased last year. [[Government subsidies to rural buyers helped.) The bestselling car in the U.S., the Ford F-series pickup, no longer comes close to that sales level. There are more than 2 million Sunshines on China's roads.
The lucky manufacturer of this bestselling vehicle in the world's largest and fastest-growing market? General Motors--the company that needed a government handout to survive in 2009. In the U.S. and Europe GM may or may not succeed in making cars that consumers want. In China it is producing exactly what customers need: cheap transportation.
GM builds these vans so efficiently with its two Chinese partners that it plans to expand Wuling's entry-level product line to include passenger cars and replicate its low-cost business model throughout the developing world, starting with India.Of course GM, which borrowed $50 billion from U.S. taxpayers, has a lot of work to do to repair its business in its home market. But the automaker's future won't be determined in Detroit or North America. That future, instead, will play out in China and the rest of Asia, where GM is reinventing itself as a lean and highly profitable automaker.

[econ expat]

Tsk Tsk. Buying from a U.S. manufacturer?
Don't they know GM is a foreign company?
WHAT YOU BUY DRIVES CHINA

[lilpup]

Tsk Tsk. Buying from a U.S. manufacturer?
Don't they know GM is a foreign company?
WHAT YOU BUY DRIVES CHINA

But GM builds them there [[at China's insistence) unlike many of foreign cars sold here that are built overseas.

If everything was built here instead of having so much imported people here would be a lot happier but our government doesn't seems to have neither the knowledge nor the spine to impose the protectionist measures other nations do, so we just get screwed.

[Retroit]

^True. GM doesn't have the legacy costs [[employee benefits) in China like they do in the US.

[canuck]

^True. GM doesn't have the legacy costs [[employee benefits) in China like they do in the US.

GM doesnt have these costs and they may be paying back some of that govt money from chisese sales of that vehicle alone. Notice that damned govt interventionism again though; rural subsidies from the chinese govt. No need for a cash for clunkers if you are trading in a bicycle.