This article on BMW basically illustrates its plan of shifting its production line of the Mini brand towards the East. China is the biggest market for BMW with a sale of 560,000 vehicles last year which was more than the sales of US and Germany combined. BMW wants to pivot production of the Mini brand to where there is more demand. The article suggests that Mini plans to move to an "all electric" concept car and is thinking of teaming up with China's Great Wall Motor because of a strong demand for electric cars in the region. On the other hand, BMW has also assured its production markets in Germany and the UK that this move will not impact them and they remain committed to investments there.
In my opinion, I think in the long run other European automobile makers will also be pushing to capture markets in China and ultimately shift their production lines to the East. The East can be seen as the rising market for such automobiles and as BMW said "production follows the market" China is the new market.
http://money.cnn.com/2018/02/23/autos/bmw-china-electric-mini/index.html
2 comments:
This is a very interesting article, especially after talking about how Germany has done a good job of keeping production in Germany because of wages. I wonder if this move will cause a decline in product quality as in the past the German product was thought of as such a well built product.
China is promoting the electric cars because China has plenty of electricity but less gasoline. If BMW builds electric Minis in China, it would definitely benefit from the policies in China. Electric cars have huge potential in the Chinese market and I believe that it is a good decision to focus more on it.
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