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| MG Car |
The MG6, a hatchback priced from 15,500 pounds ($25,000) and with a top speed of 120 miles per hour (190 kmph), is being produced for the U.K. market, with MG targeting as many as 3,000 sales this year, sales chief Guy Jones said in an interview.
SAIC inherited MG’s Longbridge plant in Birmingham through its 2007 merger with Nanjing Automobile Group Corp., which had bought the site after MG Rover, Britain’s biggest carmaker, went bust with the loss of 6,500 jobs. SAIC had previously paid $116 million for Rover design rights and may be renewing U.K. output as a prelude to selling a Chinese-built version of the MG6 in Europe, according to automotive analyst Peter Schmidt.
“It’s quite a cunning, window-dressing exercise to prepare the public for the inevitability of Chinese-made cars being imported into the U.K. market,” said Schmidt, managing director of Warwick, England-based Automotive Industry Data. “I’d view it as a pilot scheme, just to test the water.”
The MG6, designed by Tony Williams-Kenny, a former Rover employee, has a 1.8 liter turbocharged petrol engine and can accelerate from a standing start to 60 mph in 8.4 seconds. The five-door model, which MG is styling a “sports fastback,” will be sold via a network of 38 U.K. dealerships, with a further 23 to be added “fairly soon,” company spokesman Doug Wallace said.
‘Foothold’
MG will this year introduce a second model at Longbridge, which employs more than 300 designers and engineers, and future projects and engine variants could lift production to “tens of thousands” of vehicles in coming years, Jones said.
SAIC, China’s biggest domestic carmaker, is already producing the MG6 as the Roewe 550 in its home market.
“The plan is to create a strong foothold in China and then a presence in the key European markets,” Jones said on Bloomberg Television’s The Pulse with Maryam Nemazee. “The next five years will be a very exciting high growth period for our business.”
Asian automakers have bought European assets to gain access to technology and brands that will encourage sales.
Ford Motor Co. sold Sweden’s Volvo Cars to Zhejiang Geely Holding Group Co. of China last year for $1.5 billion after disposing of U.K.-based Jaguar Land Rover to India’s Tata Motors Ltd. for $2.4 billion in 2008.
Cast Aside
MG was cast aside by Bayerische Motoren Werke AG (BMW) in 2000 as the world’s biggest luxury car maker unwound its 1994 takeover of Rover Group, from which it retained only the Mini brand.
BMW had bought the U.K. company in 1994 for 1.2 billion euros ($1.74 billion) and ended up losing 6 billion euros over the next six years as the unit’s market share shrank, with the results sparking the dismissal of then-CEO Bernd Pischetsrieder.
The German company sold MG Rover for a nominal 10 pounds to Phoenix Venture Holdings, a private-equity firm run by ex-Rover manager John Towers, before the carmaker collapsed owing 1.3 billion pounds in 2005.
