走自主之路，创国际品牌——从劣势中崛起的奇瑞.pdf

a u t o m o t i v e m a y 2 0 0 8 Selling China’s cars to the world: An interview with Chery’s CEO Yin Tongyao explains how his fledgling automotive company learned to profit from adversity. Paul Gao Article China’s top car exporter, Chery, sold almost 120,000 cars in nearly 70 foreign countries in at a 2007—a 130 percent increase from the 2006 level—and has seven assembly plants in Asia, glance Africa, Europe, and South America. With proprietary technology to build core components (such as engines, gearboxes, and chassis), Chery became the first Chinese automaker to develop products and manufacture cars for foreign original-equipment manufacturers. In this interview, chairman and CEO Yin Tongyao explains how he sees the looming energy crisis as an opportunity to sell Chery’s small and midmarket cars in mature markets. Few people took Chery Automobile seriously when it was established, a little more than a decade ago, in the city of Wuhu, in Anhui Province, China. Chery was a newcomer in a small area that had little tradition of manufacturing and was far from the country’s traditional centers of auto production, in Beijing, Changchun, Shanghai, and Wuhan. When the start-up failed to find buyers for a motor engine it had developed, there was little choice but to manufacture a car of its own so that the engine could find a home. After this first car had been built, bureaucratic obstacles prevented the company from selling it. As chairman and chief executive officer Yin Tongyao puts it, “Chery kept hitting the wall over the past decade. Every time we hit a wall, we just reoriented and moved on.” Chery truly has moved on. In 2007, it sold 381,000 passenger cars, generating 20 billion renminbi ($2.86 billion) in sa