Volvo China headquarter to establish Tuesday
- Source: Global Times
- [15:38 January 24 2011]
- Comments
Volvo will establish its China's headquarter in Shanghai on Tuesday (25). Stefen Jacoby, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Volvo will attend the ceremony and start his three-day visit to China, according to the China Business News.
The new headquarter will be fully functional by adding product developing, manufacturing, quality control, purchase, investment, finance, human resources, and public affairs to its original businesses. "As it is similar with the headquarter in Sweden, the establishment of the new headquarter basically realizes the double-headquarter goal that Li Shufu, chairman of Geely Group had proposed previously," an unnamed employee revealed.
With both of them, the management structure of Volvo will be flatter, and affairs of the headquarter in China will be reported to Stefen Jacoby.
Personnel changes
The company also made some personnel changes on its management group. Volvo Cars China had, on January 5, appointed Richard Snijders as Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Volvo Car Sales (Shanghai) Co., Ltd.. The former CEO Alexander Klose will return to Ford.
Experts in the industry believe that the personnel change is due to the company's dissatisfaction towards Klose's performance during his mandate. Although Volvo was purchased by Geely last year, the company's sales increased steadily, reaching 374,000 units with a year-on-year growth of 11.2 percent, reversing the decline trend of previous years. However, the sales volume of Volvo in China was still far behind other luxury cars last year.
Big moves after the spring festival
Volvo China will accelerate its reform speed by setting up a technical center and publishing the development strategy of Volvo Cars China.
Currently R&D centers of joint ventures in China mainly deal with localization of existing foreign car models, instead of developing new cars. However, the new tech center will innovate and design products according to the tastes of Chinese customers.
"Chinese market has become the fastest developing luxury car market in the world. Audi's rise worldwide is due to its success in China. Thus, the best hope for Volvo's revival depends on whether it can succeed in China," Jia Xinguang, an auto analyst said.
However, there are still challenges for the automaker. First, the tech center has to attract a large number of talents. Second, whether the localization strategy can develop smoothly will be told by time. On one side, Volvo needs more competitive local products, on the other, the current factories in China face the problem of insufficient capacity. Volvo claims that its local products will still target at the high-end market.
