Multinational Company's Technological Transformation And The Development Of Chinese Car Industry

With China joining WTO and the improvement of the living standards, the auto industry develops rapidly; especially the speed of development of the car industry has attracted the sight of the transnational manufacturer of automobile. The car industry develops rapidly, but it exsits more problems. In 2003, There are 29 main enterprises producing car in China, and the total output is 2,109 thousand cars, less than the production scale of only one foreign enterprise. Except for Cherry and Geely, the others cooperate with foreign automobile enterprises that offer the key technology of manufacturing automobile. After cooperating with foreign automobile enterprises for more than 20 years, car enterprises in China don't have the development ability of car, and we have not mastered the key technology of car.Our original intention is that, we import technology through corporating with the foreign automobile enterprises, to improve the ability to develope independently of the Chinese car manufacturer, drive the development of the whole Chinese car industry, and strengthen the competitiveness of the Chinese car industry, but it is not realized. The technological transformation of the trans-corporation has not brought substantive improvement to Chinese car industry, and it has caused us to rely on the technological transformation more and more, thus fallen into a Strange circle "importing--- localization ---importing again".Because the Chinese car industry starts relatively later, and the technology is relatively backward, so the thought improving the level of manufacturing car by importing foreign technology is correctly. What's wrong with Chinese car industry on earth? What kind of cooperative way we need; Whether we should accept totally the technology transferred by trans-corporation or not; Whether we should pursuit high or low rate of localization simply today; How to appraise the localization of car; How much we depend on the technology from the foreign enterprises. All these questions are what we meet while we face to the technology transformation of MNCs.In this article, we has analysed the situation of technology cooperation between the Chinese car industry and the MNCs at first, including the state of development of Chinese car industry, the situation of investment and technological transformation from MNCs. Then we has analysed the degree of depending on foreign technology, including the localization process of the Chinese car industry, and providing theevaluation index and model of the localization level; Then has analysed the innovation ability of Chinese car industry and the developping orbit of technological innovation ability about Chinese car industry; Finally taking Shanghai Volkswagen as an example, we has analysed the competitiveness of Chinese car industry from economic strengthen, technological strengthen, input and output ability, profit ability and development ability.