The Analysis Of Promoting The Competitiveness Of Self-owned Brand Auto Companies

China’s auto industry has made substantial improvement in such aspects as infrastructure construction, production and marketing scale and the market layout, since China’s foundation. And it has preliminarily formed a complete industrial chain of production, research and development. Therefore it has been equipped with certain technical foundation, competitiveness and the preliminary ability to participate in international competition. But compared with developed countries, there is a long way to go for Chinese enterprises in developing its core competitiveness, such as research and development of core technology, brand building, marketing network construction, and multinational collectivization management and operation etc. How to break through the industry bottleneck and realize leaping development in core competitiveness has become a great problem for numerous car companies, especially self-owned brand ones. After the reform and opening up of China, faced with the extremely weak auto industry base and the great technology gap, China’s enterprises chose to "exchange market for technology", in the hope of realizing Chinese dream of self-owned cars through the joint venture with the world auto giants. However, it all backfired. Chinese auto companies have not become strong. They could not get access to the core technology, and their energy was dragged down with resources occupied by the joint business venture. Therefore, self-owned technology and brands couldn’t make progress.Compared with "exchanging market for technology", Chinese companies can break through the technological monopoly of automotive corporations in developed countries, get direct access to core technology, and become more dominant over the taken-over auto companies through overseas merger and acquisition (M&A). Through overseas M&A, Chinese enterprises can also achieve comprehensive improvement of enterprise competitiveness relying on technology, network, brand and experience of the acquired companies.Under the impact of the economic crisis since2008, the worldwide auto companies have depressed and various auto enterprises have been on the verge of bankruptcy, or waiting for the government relief, or at a loss sale. This crisis has brought a new integration of the global auto industry. Against the depression in foreign car makers, under the protection of the government and the explosive growth of the domestic automobile market, Chinese auto companies have maintained a strong momentum of development, which brings them great opportunity for overseas merger and acquisition of high-quality assets. In March2010, Geely bid$1.8billion to obtain100%controlling stake of Volvo cars. The acquisition has been the biggest merger and acquisition for China’s auto industry so far, and its wholly owned holding method and full acquirement of core technology set up a new model for the Chinese auto enterprises’ overseas M&A.Under the above background, this paper studies how to promote China’s auto industry competitiveness. The first part presents the overall development of China’s automobile industry and gives the detailed presentation of the accelerated development of China’s automobile industry from planned economy to the reform and opening up with foreign capital brought in, and to the new century. Focusing on the case of Geely’s acquisition of Volvo, the second part of this paper analyzes the impact of this acquisition through the SWOT analysis, and concludes the improvement of Geely’s competitiveness based on the management after acquisition, as well as the benefits to self-owned auto companies’development of overseas M&A. In the end, this paper analyzes the present situation and existing problems of China’s auto industry’s competitiveness, and then provides some experience and related advice about the development of Chinese self-owned auto companies based on the case of Geely’s acquisition of Volvo.