新视野大学英语视听说教程第四册 Unit 9 Task3: Cars sell well in China.
Although automobile prices in China are among the highest in the world, cars are still selling like hotcakes, the Beijing-based reported.
Statistics show that China has been the top consumer of limousine brands such as Rolls-Royce and Bentley, and their sales volume accounts for almost 20 percent of the total in the whole Asian continent.
According to German figures, China has been the biggest market for BMW and Mercedes-Benz in the world, combined with a sales volume between 6,000 to 7,000 units every year.
The newspaper said various famous international car makers are competing with one another now for more market share in China. Mercedes-Benz is cooperating with Chinese institutions on car research and plans to establish a design center here. Meanwhile, Volkswagen, also from Germany, has set up a new lab center in Beijing. The founding of these research and design centers indicates that the competition among multinational car producers in China now includes research in addition to sales.
As a price gap exists between China’s and the international auto market, the returns on luxury cars from the domestic market are much higher than the five-percent profit margin in the international market. Over 30 percent of the manufacturers’gains resulted from spare part sales.
Considering the steadying market demand experts estimated that the prices of luxury cars would not decrease by large margins this year.
The newspaper noted that major consumers of luxury cars in China are entrepreneurs, professional managers of foreign companies, professionals with high incomes,and young white-collar workers.
