Volkswagen Grows Nearly 25 Percent Worldwide

How do you like your dealer? Is VAG still squeezing the US dealers, and passing the pain on to you?

Zerofoo: Not quite as long as the U.S., but more than a quarter of a century. VW brought the first mass produced joint venture car to China.

I think they did, on occasion. I do know they not only counted post-acquisition sales of Mazda, Volvo et al for their 100-year sales figure but they also retroactively counted sales from before any of those companies were part of the Ford empire.

What do you think GM does? They only own 49% of GM China and count all cars as theirs. What's worse, they count more than a million Wuling vans, made by joint venture in which they have only a 34 percent share, as GM. Wouldn't it be for Wuling, then the 1.8 million GMs made in China would be less than 800,000 - made by a minority-owned JV.

I've long since argued that if people want to play this game, then play it fair. The size of the stake is proportional to how many cars you can claim. Therefore if you own a 20% stake in a company which makes 1 million cars, then you count 200,000 cars towards your figure. It's the only way to make sense of these joint ventures. However, no-one will ever make this industry standard as it will actually reveal the TRUE size of companies and possibly wipe millions of pounds off their share value.

Cammy, that scheme makes perfect sense. But I'm not sure I agree with your reasoning as to why it will never happen. If the average commenter on TTAC knows that production is counted this way, then surely any investor worth his/her salt knows it too.

If investors were half as savvy as you imply, then things like the tech bubble, housing bubble and oil bubble would never happen. That just simply isn't true. For goodness sake, look at the banking crisis. Loads of people working in banking, finally had to admit, then didn't have a sodding clue what they were doing and that it largely guess work. Just look at how GM tried to hold onto their "world's largest" title using mathematical trickery.

My point is that in this case it doesn't require much savvy at all. From a financial perspective, the automobile industry is quite mature and very well understood--at least enough for anyone to understand what the production numbers (which are published for all to see) mean. Anyone with half a brain can look at the actual numbers instead of just taking the marketing claims at face value. By way of contrast, during the tech bubble, many investors really had no clue what they were buying, but (I suspect) didn't want to be left out. Many of the companies with soaring stock prices had no real business plans beyond "spend a bunch of money to build something; then lots of customers will come, and we'll figure out a way to make money off them." Something similar can probably be said about the banking crisis (particularly with all the hopelessly complex financial derivative products being offered), but I don't know much about that industry.