SAIC Will Buy Into GM

Bertel Schmitt
by Bertel Schmitt

It’s a done deal, says Sinocast via Trading Markets. Chen Hong, president of China’s SAIC has gone to the US. He’s not there to visit Niagara Falls and Yosemite. He’s there to negotiate how much of SAIC’s $5.7b in cash and cash equivalents will be converted into GM stock on November 18.

GM officially posted its prospectus on November 3, and executives of SAIC have been analyzing it. They probably haven’t seen anything new. Few people know more about GM than China’s SAIC.

Buying some GM stock is probably a good investment, if only to dampen the anti-Chinese rhetoric. Have we heard anything anti-Chinese from the UAW lately?

Bertel Schmitt
Bertel Schmitt

Bertel Schmitt comes back to journalism after taking a 35 year break in advertising and marketing. He ran and owned advertising agencies in Duesseldorf, Germany, and New York City. Volkswagen A.G. was Bertel's most important corporate account. Schmitt's advertising and marketing career touched many corners of the industry with a special focus on automotive products and services. Since 2004, he lives in Japan and China with his wife <a href="http://www.tomokoandbertel.com"> Tomoko </a>. Bertel Schmitt is a founding board member of the <a href="http://www.offshoresuperseries.com"> Offshore Super Series </a>, an American offshore powerboat racing organization. He is co-owner of the racing team Typhoon.

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  • Carguy Carguy on Nov 08, 2010

    Contrary to the graphic used with this article, there is nothing sinister about foreign investors. The same hysterical hype was spouted in the 80s when the Japanese apparently were going to "own America" in a matter of years. If you look beyond the anti-Chinese hysteria, the SAIC buy-in is great news for GM and for the US tax payer.

  • Showbizkid Showbizkid on Nov 08, 2010

    That certainly is an inflammatory graphic! I don't approve of the deal for one reason: in time of war, GM is a major national defense contractor. Having big amounts of foreign investment capital from a nation ideologically dissimilar to our seems to me a security problem. And you can't tell me that this deal is not being done without the active (or at least tacit) approval of the Chinese government.

    • See 2 previous
    • Bertel Schmitt Bertel Schmitt on Nov 08, 2010

      "Tacit approval?" Nearly all of the big Chinese automakers are OWNED by the government, one way or the other. Although officially a publicly traded company, SAIC is controlled by the Shanghai Municipal Government. SAIC had started out as a department of the municipality. In any case, no foreign investment of note by a Chinese entity, public or private, happens without official governmental approval.

      Jeez, if I want to import a container of jellybeans to China, I need governmental approvals. Several. I get them, no problem, but without the big red stamps, no deal.

  • Mr Carpenter Mr Carpenter on Nov 08, 2010

    psarhjinian is right about that. I guess I cannot really speak with authority about China, but having lived in the US for most of my life (and also having lived OUTSIDE of the US twice in my life for extended periods of time), I'm able to safely agree that the Untied Status of Amerika has slowly morphed into a fascist state. The definition of which could be loosely paraphrased from how Mussolini described Fascism (and he certainly was one to know what the thing was, being a fascist dictator of Italy): "The union of state and corporate interests to the exclusion of the interests of the general population."

    • See 3 previous
    • 86er 86er on Nov 08, 2010

      See, that's half your problem; if you lived in Saskatchewan, you'd be there by now.

  • Bertel Schmitt Bertel Schmitt on Nov 08, 2010

    Got you. It's actually an ancient anti-Japanese expansionism poster.

    Didn't happen.

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