Managing The Dragon

While car sales in the United States increased by a sizzling 27 percent in February, China’s auto industry managed to eke out only a single-digit increase, a rare occurrence in China’s auto industry. According to Kate Zhu, auto analyst for Morgan Stanley Asia Ltd., passenger vehicle sales totaled 772,441 units in February, up 7.4 percent [...]

“Feb. auto sales jump 27 percent, top expectations,” the Reuters headline screamed to readers. Sitting here in China, of course, headlines like this are the rule, not the exception. China’s auto industry has been on a tear, with sales ratcheting up well beyond what anyone could have imagined just a few years ago. The interesting [...]

Now that the U.S. auto industry has bounced back from its lows, expect to see an increase in acquisitions of U.S. auto parts makers by Chinese companies seeking to gain access to technology and international markets. While the prices they will have to pay may be higher than in 2008 when the U.S. auto industry [...]

BYD and Geely have been the darlings of China’s auto industry. BYD, which its Chairman, Wang Chuanfu, says stands for “Beyond Your Dreams,” has received a great deal of media attention due to the large investment in the company made by billionaire Warren Buffet and its leadership position in electric vehicles. And, Geely broke the [...]

Edward C. Prescott, the Economics Chair at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, knows a thing or two about macroeconomics. In addition to his work at ASU, Prof. Prescott is a senior monetary advisor at the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank and was awarded the Nobel Prize in economic sciences in 2004. [...]

As discussed in our recent recap of the Global Auto Forum 2010, one of the consensus views expressed at the GAF was that China will have substantial excess capacity in autos by 2015, and the resulting pressure to export vehicles may lead to significant trade tensions with countries that have large automotive industries (read the [...]

The team at JFP Holdings had the honor of working with Wang Xia, Chairman of the Automotive Committee of the China Council for the Promotion of Trade, over the past year to organize the inaugural Global Auto Forum (“GAF”), which was held in the city of Chengdu in the People’s Republic of China last Thursday [...]

As the dawn of the new century, a new technology promised to fundamentally change global economics. Government leaders in the United States and China, the two largest economies in the world, believed that companies from their respective countries should lead in the development of this new technology. By 2010, two national champions, one from each [...]

While researching China’s wind turbine market, Liam Denning, who writes for the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column, noticed that Chinese companies have been gaining market share at the expense of their foreign counterparts. According to Denning’s findings, foreign companies’ share of the wind turbines sold in China dropped to 13 percent in [...]

If you’ve traveled to China, or spoken to someone who has, you have undoubtedly heard the jokes about Chinese drivers. Noting that red lights and double yellow lines are “merely suggestions” are two of the most popular China driving jokes, but there are many, many more. I won’t bore you by repeating them here. However, [...]