About 150 million families in China, involving a population of 500 million, are expected to buy automobiles in the coming 10 to 15 years and China would hopefully become No. one car market in the world, said Chen Hong, vice-president of Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation (Group) Wednesday.
Chen, also general manager of the Shanghai General Motors Corporation Limited, said that he made the forecast by taking into account of the prevailing automobile prices on the world market and China's gross domestic product (GDP) growth.
According to Chen, who is currently in Beijing attending the First Session of the 10th National People's Congress (NPC) as an NPC deputy, especially acknowledged that China's booming coastal areas boasted a tremendous market potential with its 400 million local residents.
The environment for the purchase and use of automobiles in China has to keep improving, he said. And the governments at all levels are working hard to ban irrational fee collection while an increasing number of expressways and highways are being built.
After a robust growth in 2002, Chen predicted, China's motor vehicles sales would slow down a bit but nonetheless would pick up by around 20 percent this year.
With the overall expansion of China's automobile industry, car manufacturing firms both at home and overseas would put in more resources to cope with some problems existing in the industry, Chen said. Moreover, he noted, the Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation (Group) would attain its goal of selling up to one million cars with no less than 50,000 national brand names by 2007, ranking itself in the list of the Fortune 500.
March 12, 2003
Source: Xinhua News Agency
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