China's premium car market to maintain 30% growth rate in 2011
- Source: Gasgoo
- [17:34 December 01 2010]
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"China's premium car market will maintain a growth rate of around 30% in 2011, while its entire automotive market will enjoy a lower growth rate," said Zhang Xiaojun, executive vice-president of FAW-VW Audi Sales Division, auto.ynet.com reported Wednesday.
FAW-VW, a passenger-car joint venture between First Automobile Works (FAW) and Germany' largest automaker Volkswagen AG, has launched the new Audi TT and TTS models in the domestic market in the wake of the Audi A3 as competition in the high-end vehicle segment has become extremely fierce.
Audi-VW's luxury car unit currently has a very tight production capacity worldwide, and can barely meet the market demand even though the import policies for autos tilt towards the Chinese market and its Changchun plant is already running at full capacity. With still an optimistic outlook for the country's premium car market, FAW-VW has set a sales target of 1 million units for the next three years. However, given the current situation, FAW-VW has to gear up for rapid expand capacity, Zhang said.
"FAW-VW will certainly expand capacity," Zhang added without revealing any specific plans. But he said the company will import all the Audi models into China by 2015 and will need to put more models into local production if it expects to achieve the 1 million sales target in three years.
Besdies, he pointed out that localization of the whole value chain (from product R&D, part procurement to manufacturing and marketing) is not only beneficial to the adaptive R&D, but helps to lower product costs and is also an effective way to boost sales.
