Chinese imports...

Jeremy · May 29, 2012, 06:14:58 AM

There have been many, many threads on this board about the scourge of Chinese imports...well they buy stuff from us as well. Land Rover have announced £1.5bn profits today (that's $2.4bn), and that China is now their biggest market. Pleasing to hear that we can still make stuff Birmingham and Liverpool and sell it to Beijing and Shanghai.

Jeremy

Oonrahnjay · May 29, 2012, 06:32:34 AM

Quote from: Jeremy on May 29, 2012, 06:14:58 AMThere have been many, many threads on this board about the scourge of Chinese imports...well they buy stuff from us as well. Land Rover have announced £1.5bn profits today (that's $2.4bn), and that China is now their biggest market. Pleasing to hear that we can still make stuff Birmingham and Liverpool and sell it to Beijing and Shanghai. Jeremy

Yes, nice that the profit from all those sales in China are going to Tata in India. We are firmly globalized.

Jeremy · May 29, 2012, 06:48:37 AM

Yes, that does spoil it a bit - but JLR has three factories and thousands of employees and suppliers in the UK, and pay their corporate taxes here, so better not to be too churlish about where the owners live. Does make you wonder what the bosses of BMW and Ford now think about their decisions to sell Land Rover though...

Jeremy

eagle19952 · May 29, 2012, 09:35:25 PM

At $82 billion,

China is a distant third in U.S. imports compared to Canada and Mexico, but it is quickly rising.

Oonrahnjay · May 30, 2012, 08:57:44 AM

Quote from: Jeremy on May 29, 2012, 06:48:37 AM(snip) Does make you wonder what the bosses of BMW and Ford now think about their decisions to sell Land Rover though... Jeremy

Yeah, and throw a bunch of good (but "too old") employees out in the street in the process. Not that I have any ill feelings about that, of course ...

CrabbyMilton · May 30, 2012, 09:39:28 AM

I think BCI is a Chinese based company though it seems hard to pin that one down. FORD did the right thing by dumping LAND ROVER. LAND ROVER was in trouble long before FORD bought them in the first place so that would have just been a financial drag. I don't like the idea of all of the Chicom imports but, like it or not, people demand perfection and by darn don't want to pay for it either. I speak from experience where it can be of more benefit to take pliers and pull out your teeth than to get people to show up for work. I don't even own a business but I have trained countless people over the decades and that's bad enough. So we have nobody to blame for this but ourselves for wanting everything and not wanting to work or pay for it. Until the day we learn how to produce and getting our collective heads out of our...but anyway, we can expect more of the same imported trash.

Jeremy · May 30, 2012, 03:27:56 PM

Land Rover was in big trouble when BMW bought them (as part of the Rover group, which was in even bigger trouble); Beemer sunk huge quantities of money into LR, mainly to develop the current Range Rover, the launch of which was a turning point for the company. The L322 Range Rover was at the time (maybe still is) the most expensive new vehicle development programme in history; the consensus is that BMW's decision to buy Rover was a major mistake in financial terms, but that it was a good most strategically because it gave them a very quick way of gaining the knowledge necessary to extend it's own car range into the high-growth SUVs market - they have several now (X1, X3, X5, X6), whereas before Land Rover they had none.

BMW sold Land Rover and Jaguar to Ford for £1.8bn (not much more than LR made in profit this year), at a time when Ford was on a major spending spree and buying car companies left, right and centre - most of which had to be sold again a few years later to pay their debts (but at least Ford didn't ask the Government to bail them out).

I've no idea whether it's really fair to say whether Land Rover was a 'financial drag' on Ford - no doubt they invested more money (for instance, the Discovery 3 / Range Rover Sport was introduced during their ownership, and Ford virtually rebuilt their Halewood factory and gave it to Land Rover), but these corporate mega-deals are vastly more complex and convoluted than can be measured by a simple money-in vs money-out calculation anyway.

Sorry - not much about buses in this thread yet.

Jeremy