China: Voting with their wallets THE BIGGEST THREAT to the world's established carmakers in recent years was expected to come from Chinese competitors (and from a few Indian ones with international ambitions), but so far it has not materialised. Under plans drawn up by the government in Beijing in 1994, two or three world-class Chinese makers should be going head-to-head with GM, Toyota and the rest by now, but this has not happened. As China's domestic market has boomed, the local brands have become increasingly sidelined as consumers have bought foreign ones. Chinese car companies started off working with foreign joint-venture partners, which the Chinese government hoped would be quickly pushed aside as the domestic firms learned how to make cars to international standards. Instead, the local firms have remained utterly dependent on their foreign partners for everything from technical knowledge to marketing nous. As a former industry minister has put it, "we are hooked on joint ventures like opium." As Bernstein's study on the Chinese car market notes, the streets are full of American, European, Japanese and South Korean cars, mostly made in joint-venture factories in China, with the foreign partners raking off handsome royalties for the use of their brands and technology. The market share of Chinese brands has continued to slide, from about 30% in late 2009 to less than 26% by the end of 2012. China's favourite car last year was the Ford Focus. The rest of the top ten was made up of four kinds of VW, three GMs and two Hyundais. If they were making their own cars, China's largest firms would be approaching world scale (see chart 3), but mostly they are producing foreign brands under the direction of their foreign partners. For their study, Bernstein's analysts bought two fairly well-regarded Chinese cars - a sedan from Geely and a Great Wall SUV - and took them to Europe for road-testing and a "teardown," with specialist engineers examining their build quality. Even though the Chinese firms seemed to have made some progress in areas such as bodywork, overall the cars were badly put together and not pleasant to drive. The study concluded that China is still five to ten years from building cars to global standards without foreign help. A recent poll by McKinsey, a consultancy, found that Chinese car buyers thought the same. The Chinese makers are striving to catch up, but they are having to spend a lot of money on advice from foreign engineers and consultancies, sometimes offering salaries of up to $500,000 a year to lure experts from abroad. At the same time they are skimping on basic research, which means they will become increasingly reliant on foreign carmakers or foreign component makers. Two Chinese companies that bought foreign firms with useful technology - SAIC, which absorbed the remnants of Britain's Rover Group, and Geely, which bought Volvo of Sweden - do not seem to have much to show for their purchases yet. Its initial plan having flopped, the Chinese government has recently been pressing foreign carmakers to create new "joint-venture brands" with their local partners, in the hope of weaning the local firms off foreign technology and styling. But neither the foreign nor the Chinese makers seem enthusiastic about this, and the policy could just as easily entrench local firms" dependence on the foreigners. Meanwhile, worsening air pollution in Chinese cities is prompting the government to impose strict Western-style limits on emissions. This is likely to increase the technology gap between the foreign firms (which have already done lots of work on low-emission cars for their home markets) and the local makers. Where is China's GM? Some worry that the Chinese government will soon turn nasty, forcing the foreign carmakers to hand more technology to their Chinese partners and accept smaller royalties from the joint ventures. But BCG's Xavier Mosquet reckons that eventually China will accept that it is better to have a strong foreign-owned industry creating well-paid jobs than to prop up uncompetitive national champions. This policy change will not be announced, he predicts, but it will be noticeable. Even so, Western makers still expect at least a few competitive Chinese rivals to emerge one day: "I worry about them all the time," says Fiat's Mr Marchionne. And as they try desperately to regain local market share and to export their surplus production, they could trigger price wars at the mass-market end, eating into the foreign giants" profits. China's government has repeatedly talked about consolidating the 100-odd local carmakers, but many of them are owned or subsidised by powerful city and provincial governments, which are turning a deaf ear to such suggestions. New entrants keep popping up: at the Geneva motor show in March, Qoros, a Chinese start-up, caused a stir by exhibiting good-looking prototypes. The company is a joint venture between Chery, a private-sector Chinese carmaker, and Idan Ofer, an Israeli shipping magnate. It is building a factory in Changshu, a city near Shanghai, helped by the local government, which will have an initial capacity of 150,000. Qoros is planning to raise a total of $2.7 billion, with Mr Ofer taking a 50% equity stake. He insists that "there is always space for a new brand" and says that in his shipping business he is quite used to waiting for up to ten years to make a profit. But he probably knows that to succeed in the status-conscious Chinese market, he will first have to sell at least some of his cars to the discerning Europeans who set the trends.