China Implodes! Someone Call Glenn Beck!
New car sales in China imploded in January. This will be the message when the official data by the CAAM are announced. Which should happen any minute.
The signs are ominous: Yesterday, GM China, TTAC’s in-house leading indicator, announced ( in a way) that sales in January had been down by 8 percent. Then, China’s largest carmaker SAIC said that its January was down 8.5 percent. Today, the China Passenger Car Association told China Daily that the car market in China had nosedived16.5 percent from a year earlier to 1.17 million units in January. Late in the afternoon in Yokohama at Nissan’s quarterly earnings conference, Nissan’s Corporate Vice President, Joji Tagawa proudly pronounced that Nissan sales “declined only 16 percent” in China, while the Chinese car market as a whole registered “a negative 28 percent,” and isn’t that wonderful?
Whoa!!!! What’s going on?
Is the sky over China finally falling? It sure looks like it.
It happens every year. A phenomenon called Chinese New Year causes hundreds of millions to travel, to set off fireworks, and to paralyze commerce for weeks on end. Officially, Chinese New Year started on January 23 2012 and lasted a week. Unofficially, it can last a month. Picture Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, Hanukkah and Ramadan all rolled into one, and you’d be covering only a tiny part of what is Chinese New Year.
Now comes the really interesting part: Last year, Chinese New Year fell into February. With the result that February 2011 was a dud, car-wise, after January had been stellar. This time around, we compare an emaciated January with a prior year January on steroids. Next month, it will be different, when sales will be compared to the dud month in the prior year. Which causes Rao Da, secretary-general of the passenger car association to glibly remark that he expects an increase of around 30 percent in February.
All I can recommend: Ignore any numbers coming from China in January or February, especially percentages.
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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Don't feel threatened by Chinpokomon toy, Mr. Beck. We are very simple people with very small penis. We cannot achieve so much with such small penis, but you American wow, penis so big, so big penis!
It is fun watching Glenn Beck even knowing that he exaggerate things. But if you do not do that nobody will pay attention. I am forced to celebrate Chinese New Year, report to Chinese boss and go to cheap Chinese restaurants at work no matter how much I hate it. But Chinese also forced to celebrate Western New Year, speak English and adopt American culture. China certainly will go through their own Great Depression at certain time in future. China and Japan are getting Westernized and not in the good way.