Luxury cars dazzle at Chengdu Auto Show
- Source: CE.cn
- [08:51 October 26 2010]
- Comments
From September 18 to 24, the Chengdu International Auto Exhibition, with the theme of "green technology, happy driving" is held at New International Convention & Exposition Center Chengdu Century City. All the 9 exhibition halls plus the outdoor fields are taken that make the exhibition area reaches 120 thousand square meters. Main auto brands both at home and abroad are present and the number of exhibition halls for passenger vehicles has risen to 7 from last year's 6, the largest scale ever seen among all such exhibitions. 450 thousand visits have been recorded during the one-week exhibition.
Brands both at home and abroad are vying for the southwest market
Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou steadily holding the top three, while others competing strategically -- this has been the situation for long in China's auto exhibition. How could Chengdu rise so rapidly in recent years to become the fourth city hosting the largest international exhibition? That's because the auto market has rapidly become mature in Chengdu as well as in southwest China.
With the rapid growth of China's auto production and sales, the regional structure of car sales is also changing stealthily. A series of favorable policies released by the national government in 2009 have brought about robust purchase power in China's auto market. Western China has gradually become a new engine driving the domestic auto market and Chengdu, which is considered "the third largest city of private cars in China", has been keeping the largest auto sales in western China. What's more, the Chengdu market has great influence on the whole southwest market that makes Chengdu International Auto Exhibition an important arena for the auto brands to "march to the southwest".
The important new products of national brands such as FAW, SAIC, Dongfeng, Chang'an, and Chery and all types of vehicle of international auto tycoons such as Volkswagen, GM, Ford, and Toyota, all have been presented in the Exhibition, which indicated an enthusiastic participation of the car dealers both at home and abroad. Some of them continued to increase the inputs on the basis of the last exhibition by upgrading the scale and brands, providing the latest level of the world auto industry development for the visitors.
The southwest market, which used to be occupied by low-end cars, has attracted more and more top grade brands in recent years. In this exhibition, the high-end brands were extremely appealing.
Benz, as a rapidly growing manufacture of luxury cars, exhibited 25 types of its four brands Benz, AMG, Smart, and Maybach, and put into market four new generation cars at a time, namely, luxurious R-level sport wagon, GLK300 medium-sized SUV, SLS AMG super roadster, and Maybach 62S, displaying Benz's determination in vying with other top grade brands in the growing market in China. Volvo, who doesn't take much market share in China, also brought new products with unambiguous target. They promoted their new products of XC60 2.0T middle-sized, low-displacement vehicles to attract the visitors aiming at the robust demands on SUV in China's market.
Among those emphasizing western China market is the Italian super roadster manufacturer Lamborghini, who adopted the "marching to western China" strategy last year, and this time showed its Gallardo LP 570-4 Superleggera and Gallardo LP 550-2 in Chengdu, hoping to focus on the super roadster market in west China.
The low-end higher and the high-end lower
It is very interesting in this year's Chengdu Exhibition that "both the low and the high are thronging the middle". In the past, Chengdu auto market, as well as the whole southwest market, is dominated by economy cars, and there was a clear division between the low-end cars and the medium and-high-end cars that they were respectively on their own ways. However, both the low-end and the high-end cars were managing to reach the average in this exhibition.
