Beijing Automobile Industries Holding Co, China’s fifth-largest carmaker, is maneuvering to acquire General Motors Co’s Opel or Saab units if other potential deals fall through, reports said yesterday.
A group of Beijing Autos executives is in Europe for talks on a possible acquisition, the state-run newspaper China Business News and other reports said.
Calls to Beijing Auto’s public relations office rang unanswered yesterday and other staff contacted by telephone said they could not comment.
Beijing Autos is among several Chinese companies thought to be interested in acquiring one of the European units of either GM or Ford Motor Co, which is seeking to sell Sweden-based Volvo Cars.
Beijing, a partner with Hyundai Motor Co and Daimler AG, is not a front-runner in the bidding for either GM’s German subsidiary Adam Opel GmbH or its Swedish unit, Saab Cars. But it would be willing to step in, and has the funds to do so, China Business News said, citing unnamed company sources.
Beijing Autos had aimed for Opel, but GM has set a deal to turn Opel over to Canadian auto parts company Magna International Inc, with Russian backing.
Three bidders reportedly are in the lead to buy Saab: Koenigsegg, a Swedish sports car maker; The Renco Group Inc, a private equity firm; and Merbanco Inc, a Wyoming-based group of investors.
In recent months Chinese automakers have been named as potential bidders for various foreign car companies. So far, the only deal announced has been GM’s planned sale of its Hummer brand to Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Co, a little-known Chinese truck and equipment maker.
Chinese analysts and the state-controlled media question whether that deal will actually go through.
“Buying a fuel-hungry and high-emission brand is directly against the current trend of energy saving and emission reduction,” Xinhua news agency quoted Lu Zhongyuan (盧中原), a senior official at the Cabinet-affiliated Development Research Center, as saying yesterday.
“If it really takes this step to buy [Hummer], relevant departments should be strict and cautious with the approval, or reject the application if necessary,” the report quoted Lu as saying.
Beijing Autos is more likely to have lined up official support for any purchase it might make. Based in the Chinese capital, it reported 70.3 billion yuan (US$10.3 billion) in sales of 780,000 units last year, state media reports said.
CHANGE OF MIND: The Chinese crew at first showed a willingness to cooperate, but later regretted that when the ship arrived at the port and refused to enter Togolese Republic-registered Chinese freighter Hong Tai (宏泰號) and its crew have been detained on suspicion of deliberately damaging a submarine cable connecting Taiwan proper and Penghu County, the Coast Guard Administration said in a statement yesterday. The case would be subject to a “national security-level investigation” by the Tainan District Prosecutors’ Office, it added. The administration said that it had been monitoring the ship since 7:10pm on Saturday when it appeared to be loitering in waters about 6 nautical miles (11km) northwest of Tainan’s Chiang Chun Fishing Port, adding that the ship’s location was about 0.5 nautical miles north of the No.
A Chinese freighter that allegedly snapped an undersea cable linking Taiwan proper to Penghu County is suspected of being owned by a Chinese state-run company and had docked at the ports of Kaohsiung and Keelung for three months using different names. On Tuesday last week, the Togo-flagged freighter Hong Tai 58 (宏泰58號) and its Chinese crew were detained after the Taipei-Penghu No. 3 submarine cable was severed. When the Coast Guard Administration (CGA) first attempted to detain the ship on grounds of possible sabotage, its crew said the ship’s name was Hong Tai 168, although the Automatic Identification System (AIS)
An Akizuki-class destroyer last month made the first-ever solo transit of a Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force ship through the Taiwan Strait, Japanese government officials with knowledge of the matter said yesterday. The JS Akizuki carried out a north-to-south transit through the Taiwan Strait on Feb. 5 as it sailed to the South China Sea to participate in a joint exercise with US, Australian and Philippine forces that day. The Japanese destroyer JS Sazanami in September last year made the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force’s first-ever transit through the Taiwan Strait, but it was joined by vessels from New Zealand and Australia,
COORDINATION, ASSURANCE: Separately, representatives reintroduced a bill that asks the state department to review guidelines on how the US engages with Taiwan US senators on Tuesday introduced the Taiwan travel and tourism coordination act, which they said would bolster bilateral travel and cooperation. The bill, proposed by US senators Marsha Blackburn and Brian Schatz, seeks to establish “robust security screenings for those traveling to the US from Asia, open new markets for American industry, and strengthen the economic partnership between the US and Taiwan,” they said in a statement. “Travel and tourism play a crucial role in a nation’s economic security,” but Taiwan faces “pressure and coercion from the Chinese Communist Party [CCP]” in this sector, the statement said. As Taiwan is a “vital trading
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