SAIC, the biggest car company you've never heard of?16th February 2011
 Roewe 550 (All new design, Roewe version of the MG6) If I asked you who SAIC were, would you know? OK, regulars will of
course know, but for those who don't, SAIC (Shanghai Automotive Industry
Corporation) is the parent company of MG Motor UK and is based (as the
name suggests) in Shanghai, China and is the largest car manufacturer in
China, the largest automotive market in the world. They sold
3.58 million vehicles in 2010, 160,000 of them being MG or Roewe models,
a huge increase up from 90,000 the year before. To put this in context, Ford sold 1.9 million vehicles in North America in the same period, with GM selling 2.9m vehicles. The 160,000 vehicles of they sold of their own brands, MG and Roewe sold more in China than Honda and Toyota in the UK in 2010, combined and 40,000 more than MG Rover Group sold in 2004.
The Chinese market is made up of a lot of Joint Ventures (JVs) with the western players having very often more than one Chinese partner for different models. SAIC has JVs with VW and GM and have the relatively rare position in China of being GM's only Chinese partner and in 2010 had the first and third biggest JVs in China. So, as you can see, SAIC are a huge company in China and very, very, cash rich, indeed in 2008/2009 they were in talks with Ford to buy Volvo off them for $6bn. All of SAIC's models for MG and Roewe are designed and engineered at their global design HQ at the Birmingham Plant. There are over 300 engineers employed by SAIC, the vast majority of the based at Birmingham, with some out in China as well.  Next Page 1 of 2Roewe 750 (Based upon the Stretched Rover 75 platform)
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