Most of us first heard of Chery in 2004 when the Chinese automaker’s QQ minicar was accused of being a copy of GM’s Daewoo-developed Matiz, pretty much right down to the last spot weld. Attempts to sue Chery failed to gain traction in Chinese courts. At one point Chinese officials claimed they could find no evidence Chery had copied a GM car, even though the doors on the QQ were interchangeable with those of the Matiz. GM dropped the case in 2005 after having reached a settlement with Chery, apparently with the encouragement of the Chinese government.
The Chery QQ episode epitomized China’s notoriously lax attitude towards intellectual property theft, and the bind in which foreign companies find themselves when attempting to gain a foothold in the fastest growing consumer market in the world. It’s highly likely GM took the long view over the QQ, preferring to retain the goodwill of the Chinese government, which allows the company to participate in the highly profitable GM-Shanghai joint venture business, over having its day in court.
Five years later, it’s Chery taking the long view. Company chairman and general manager Yin Tongyao says Chery has V-6 and V-8 engines under development, along with a rear drive platform, as part of an aggressive push into the luxury sector. “You want to compete with Audi, BMW and Mercedes-Benz?” I ask the personable Yin, who happily conducts our interview on the Chery stand at the Shanghai Show in English, without the phalanx of PR flacks and interpreters preferred by Japanese auto execs. “Not yet,” Yin says. “But some time, yes. And we try to.”
Germany, you’re on notice.
Huh? Right now, the notion that Chery is gunning after the world’s most successful premium automakers is laughable. This is a company that wasn’t founded until 1997, didn’t build its first car until 1999, and barely eight years ago sold just 28,000 vehicles in total. Chery’s current product range is a mish-mash of recycled — or ripped off — Korean and Japanese hardware sometimes wrapped in surprisingly good looking styled-in-Italy sheetmetal (Chery A3) and sometimes truly hideous D-I-Y tin (Chery QQme).
But Yin is serious, and he’s instituted a program called 15/7 — which means he and his senior executives are working 15 hours a day, seven days a week — to help make it happen. He’s also just launched Chery’s own premium brand, Riich. That’s no typo…
Old habits die hard. The Riich logo is a none-too-subtle knockoff of Bentley’s famed winged B. “We try to create some luxury, something a little bit classical,” says Yin. “We think BMW, Mercedes, Audi. That’s why we use Riich . Rich people are the buyers.”
Hmmm… In China, real rich people — and there are reportedly 300,000 US dollar millionaires in the country — buy trinkets like Ferraris and Rolls-Royces and high-end Benzes. Chery’s first Riich models, the G6 (below) and G5 (at left), resemble the sort of plasti-wood, faux-lux sedans Hyundai and Daewoo used to build for the Korean market in the late 80s. The Riich M1 (pictured at top) is basically a reskinned Chery QQ with delusions of grandeur. None is going to get the primo parking spot outside of any of Beijing or Shanghai’s hipper hotels and clubs.
And Yin knows it. “This will take a long time, step by step,” he says of Chery’s luxury brand ambitions. “We are still a baby company; we are very weak. So we don’t want to think that tomorrow we will be bigger than General Motors. That’s far, far away.”
But Yin believes Chery’s stand-alone status (unlike most major Chinese automakers, it does not have a joint-venture operation with a foreign automaker) will be an advantage in the long term. “We have not relied on a joint venture, so we have more freedom,” he says. “We can export, and we have the freedom to decide which car is suitable for the market. Other Chinese companies take a long time to introduce their models their partner. We have tried to develop cars by ourselves, and we have tried to create our own R&D capacity. Now that the government wants Chinese companies to do their own development, we are a little bit ahead.”
I have no idea whether Chery really has what it takes to one day become a serious player in the global auto industry, much less a legitimate premium automaker — trying to decipher the inner workings of the Chinese auto industry is a bit like trying to play Asimovian hyperchess blindfolded. But I do know this: We laughed at the Japanese 50 years ago, and we laughed at the Koreans 20 years ago. Their first products were also klutzy, poor quality copies of other people’s cars. Today, no-one laughs at the Japanese or the Koreans. Not even Audi, BMW, or Mercedes-Benz.
Source : blogs.motortrend.com/6554445/china/chery-we-want-to-compete-with-audi-bmw-and-mercedes/index.html
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