ROFL: Opel Wants To Export To China And Australia, Again
Did you hear the one about Opel’s latest scheme to stave off disaster? Don’t read this article while driving or operating heavy machinery.
Opel wants to sell 30,000 cars in China – eventually. Or rather “step by step,” as Opel CEO Karl-Friedrich Stracke told Germany’s Handelsblatt today. (Not on-line, therefore via Reuters.) This is not the first time Opel had announced plans for China.
Two years ago, Opel announced plans to export cars to China and Australia. With little success. In GM China’s 2010 year-end sales report, there is no Opel. In the 2011 sales report, a grand total of 4,864 Opels are mentioned, most of them the Antara SUV – which was imported from Korea. That’s not exactly what Opel workers in Bochum and Rüsselsheim had in mind when they demanded the opening of export markets. Stracke may be able to flummox the Handelsblatt reporter, but not his workers who had never seen the developed-in-Korea trucklet.
Yesterday, F.K. Stracke sold old wine in even older wineskins. He plans, says Stracke, Opel exports to China and Australia. Until that happens in significant numbers (don’t hold your breath,) Opel will remain “almost solely dependent on a European market that has shrunk for the fifth year in a row,” says Reuters.
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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I believe that the plans are reasonably well advanced to sell Opels here in Australia. We certainly have been hearing a bit about it over the last year or so. There is a dedicated fanbase of Opel enthusiasts who are dirty about Holden substituting their rebadged Opel models (Barina, Astra and Vectra) with rebadged GMDAT/Daewoos (another Barina, Viva/Cruze and Epica). The first of the new Korean models were pretty dire, and Holden will not be allowed to forget that the Barina went from a 4 star ANCAP crash rating for the Opel-sourced model to 2 star for the new Daewoo-sourced model. Progress... not... It was all done to cut costs of course, but it was a bit of a public relations disaster for Holden as they went from the nice-handling (though iffy-reliability) Opels to the blamange-like Daewoos. Holden has been heavily involved with later model developments (like the Holden/Chevy Cruze), and the Daewoo-sourced cars have improved significantly, but the Opel contingent have remained fairly vocal. Now that Opel is supposedly returning to compete against Holden with the latest European model range, there is an element of 'Haha! We'll teach you to abandon the European models, Holden' about it. But, even if Opel does return, I think that it is destined to fail. Australia is a notoriously difficult market to break into and, apart from the diehard fans, not many people have ever heard of Opel. The people that used to drive the Astras five years ago now drive VW Golfs and Mazda 3's. Opel plan on marketing premium-end products in the respective categories - a market that Volkswagen have sewn up. Toyota, Mazda and, increasingly, Hyundai mop up most of the rest. There will be an initial flurry of sales to the faithful, but I suspect this is not the time to launch a new brand with virtually zero recognition. One more thing. All that a competing salesperson would need to do if they find out a potential customer was considering an Opel is to mention engine timing belts. They snapped with alarming regularity on the Astras and Vectras, destroying engines by the score. I alone have 3 friends who all ended up with wrecked engines. Holden eventually came through with fixes for all, but it was a long and unpleasant experience for all of them - one mention of the Opel association, and I would guarrantee that Opels would be wiped off the shopping list for all of them. A lot of Australian customers went through a lot of grief with this issue, and I can't imagine any salesperson worth their job leaving it unsaid if a potential customer mentioned Opel...
Killing Saturn for good in 2002 and exporting Opels (as Opels) to North America and the world in its place could have mayyyyybe worked for them and given them a ten year head start... Opel could have been the new Saturn/Oldsmobile with Euro flair and a 'German engineering' tagline similar to Volkswagen. But now Opel is just a day late and dollar short in a world market crowded with far too many automotive brands and a dwindling new car market outside of the emerging third world.
I was always a bit confused, never could figure out if Opel was here officially in China or not. There are a LOT of opels running around Shanghai many of them brand new. I take those are grey market vehicles and not official imports?
The Holden badged Opel models we got in Oz were pretty well regarded, the Astra selling quite well.Badged as Opels...hard to say, it all depends if they plan to establish their own dealer network, what pricing is like and their customer service. I wouldn't be optimistic about their chances of success....