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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GUSTAVE JAEGER who wrote (67227)	8/11/2005 5:02:30 AM
From: elmatador	Respond to of 74559

Curtailing China's access to oil is good! We need them to buy Ethanol. They should be bblcoked like they were in UNOCAL case. Just 10% of Ethanol in each takn is ehough!!! Cars in China Dream machines Jun 2nd 2005 \| BEIJING AND SHANGHAI From The Economist print edition Reuters China is not yet an auto-culture in the mould of the United States. But it may only be a matter of time “CHINA has begun to enter the age of mass car consumption. This is a great and historic advance.” So proclaimed the state-run news agency, Xinhua, last year. Environmentalists may feel a twinge of fear at this burgeoning romance with motoring. But a rapid social and economic transformation is under way in urban China, and the car is steering it. In 2002 demand for cars in China soared by 56%, far more than even the rosiest projections. The next year growth quickened to 75%, before slowing in 2004 (when the government tightened rules on credit for car purchases) to around 15%. But in a sluggish global market, China's demand remains mesmerising. Few expect this year's growth to dip below 10%. As long as the economy goes on galloping at its current high-single-digit clip, many expect car sales to increase by 10-20% annually for several years to come. Ford issued a press release about the company’s expansion into China’s auto market. Shanghai Volkswagen joined forces with the Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation. Peugeot Citroën has two plants in China. See also the Shanghai Circuit, which hosts the Formula One race. Gargantuan figures trip merrily from the tongues of car manufacturers. With 5m car sales last year, China is already the world's third-largest car market, after America (17m) and Japan (5.9m). “China is going to become the second-largest market in the world sometime over the next two or three years,” says David Thomas, head of China distribution for Ford. Between 2010 and 2015, he thinks, it could be the biggest. “China is developing in very similar ways (to the developed markets), but doing it so much quicker,” Mr Thomas adds. “So much quicker,” he repeats. At the same time, China has been pouring billions into expanding its highway network. By the end of 2004, China had 34,000km (21,000 miles) of motorways, more than double the 2000 figure (17 years ago, it had none). Only the United States has more. China's total road network is the world's third-longest: 1.8m km, with 44% of it built in the past 15 years. Nor will it stop there. By 2020, China plans to double again the length of its motorways.