AutoBeta(AutoBeta.net)03/15 Report--

BMW has confirmed that it will expand its stake in brilliance, control the joint venture and buy a stake in BMW brilliance for 3.6 billion euros, raising its stake to 75 per cent. Now there is news that Audi, another German luxury brand, is also considering increasing its stake in a Chinese joint venture.

Song Yinzhe (Alexander Seitz), director of Audi's China operations, revealed that Audi is considering whether to increase its stake in its Chinese joint venture, Reuters reported. Song Yinzhe said: "We will have more news about this at the end of this year or early next year." We welcome the opening of the Chinese market. Any decisions we make will not be made by ourselves alone-all our stakeholders will be involved in the process. "

It is worth noting that Shi Baitao, general manager of FAW-Volkswagen Audi sales Division, said in an interview last year that there were no plans to adjust FAW-Volkswagen Audi stock ratio. In addition, Ouyang Qian, president of Audi China, also said that he would not adjust the proportion of shares in FAW-Volkswagen Audi.

Just a few days ago, Volkswagen CEO Dis revealed that it was considering increasing its stake in the Chinese joint venture and would determine whether the plan to increase the stock ratio would work by the end of this year or early next year.

Audi has two joint ventures in China, one is FAW-Volkswagen Audi and the other is SAIC Audi, among which SAIC Audi has not really been established and put into production. Audi delivered 1.8125 million new cars worldwide in 2018, down 3.5% from a year earlier. In the Chinese market, Audi broke the sales record again with a sales record of 663049 vehicles, up 10.9% from the same period last year. From January to February this year, Audi sold 104100 vehicles in China, up 3.8 per cent from a year earlier and accounting for nearly 40 per cent of Audi's global sales. Audi had previously predicted that the Chinese market would grow slightly in 2019 and was likely to achieve its sales target of 1 million vehicles in the Chinese market in 2022.

With regard to the "SAIC Audi" project, the Audi Dealers Association, FAW, FAW-Volkswagen and Audi reached the "May 19 Agreement" as early as 2017, which stipulates that all parties should strive to ensure sales of 900000 vehicles in 2022; third parties must not enter the Chinese market before January 2022; adhere to one sales company and one sales network in China. In other words, SAIC Audi project will not officially enter the market until 2022, when the restrictions on foreign equity ratio of Chinese passenger cars will also be officially lifted, so it is difficult to say how much Audi shares in SAIC Audi projects.

In the early days, China's automobile technology was weak, and the government hoped to exchange "market for technology" through the "50-50" Sino-foreign joint venture vehicle share ratio system. The purpose of formulating this policy at that time was to ensure that China's fledgling automobile industry could exchange the market for technology through building factories with Volkswagen and General Motors, but the result was obviously not satisfactory. For many years, the development of China's own brands is still far from advanced overseas car companies. Industry insiders believe that further opening up of joint venture shares may be more likely to stimulate the development of own-brand car companies.

In January this year, the morning auto shareholders' special meeting approved the sale of a 25 per cent stake in brilliance BMW to BMW, which will buy part of brilliance BMW for 3.6 billion euros, raising its stake to 75 per cent. After BMW, Audi also has the idea of increasing its stake in a joint venture in China, but FAW SAIC is not as "talkative" as brilliance, so let's wait and see what happens.

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