#pangda

The accounts are empty, GM keeps saying no, the reconstruction administrator is about to pull the plug on Saab. Unfazed, The Church of The True Saab goes from clumsy spinning to simply telling lies. First, they turned “a bank in China” into “the Bank of China.” As Chinacartimes quips, this “could be anything from the smallest local city bank to a national level bank.”

Now, Saabsunited spins another yarn to keep the faithful from losing faith and face:

“Pang Da says that they are not out of the deal, on the contrary, they continue talks.”

“There is almost no chance for the government to approve Pangda’s purchase of Spyker’s stake, let alone their plan to set up a new joint venture in China,” so said Zhang Xin, an analyst at Beijing-based Guotai Junan Securities, to Bloomberg. “The deal doesn’t fit in the government’s plan for consolidation.”

For people with a sober mind, for people who do not suffer from a Stockholm Syndrome where hostages express empathy and have positive feelings towards their captors, the shotgun marriage between Saab and Chinese car distributor Pangda left many questions open. What was related through Spyker channels did not sound like business the way it is done in China.

Pangda’s CEO and founder Pang Qing Hua talked about his plans for Saab in an interview with the Chinese website, Auto Sohu. ChinaCarTimes supplied the translation into English, you can read the full version here.

What you will read will make much more sense than the breathless announcements by Victor Muller.

The interview answers some questions we had asked all along, for instance the question of the miraculous arrival of €30 million by last Tuesday. Pang Qing Hua explains:

Rick Kranz, product editor at Automotive News, had an epiphany: “To understand Victor Muller’s obsession with China, you need to understand where that market is headed,” Kranz wrote. Ok, enlighten us, sensei. Where is it headed?

Victor Muller is getting desperate. Hard up for cash, he is willing to sell 24 percent of Saab to a car dealer in China. It’s not any car dealer, but Pangda, one of the larger chains in China. According to a Spyker press release, Pangda has “over 1100 dealerships nationwide”, according to Pag Da’s own profile (see below) is has about half of that. Be it as it may, it is a dealer group, not a larger automaker. Not even a smaller one.