MG fans were shocked yesterday to learn that the personable Paul Stowe, NAC MG’s Quality Director, tendered his resignation at the Chinese company.
   This was a surprise, considering that yesterday I had paid my first visit to MG New Zealand and chatted to operations’ manager Kerry Cheyne about the prospects of the brand here. Even in my speech last weekend, I referred to MG. I was dead serious about helping it wherever I could.
   Kerry was very positive and optimistic about the brand’s chances and pointed to some of the successes that Dodge was experiencing in New Zealand as a performance marque. He spoke highly of the work done at Nanjing and was confident that the cars would be of better quality than what left Longbridge. The Red Chinese, said Kerry, tended to make a target date and deliver.
   Although I had felt that cooperation with SAIC was a good idea, it does appear that Red agencies such as the NRDC may have been flexing their muscles a bit more when it came to NAC’s independence. A takeover is not what I wanted to see happen here, for the many reasons I have outlined over the last two years about SAIC’s behaviour. Paul reported that he had spotted SAIC personnel at the NAC factory tours earlier in August, so something was up even back then. In his own blog, he reported yesterday: ‘firstly the impact of the SAIC takeover is still echoing around the walls of NAC’s facilities, and has thrown conjecture and chaos into some of the future planning.’
   Paul is a diplomat—the non-Chinese media regarded him as an ideal front-man, as did the public who relied on the honesty of his blog—so we may have to read between the lines till he is comfortable (and legally able) with sharing more about the situation. But we can probably guess that the Politburo has little knowledge about brands and is reverting to its humans-as-production-units mentality, SAIC has plenty of allies inside the various agencies, and NAC is being treated rather poorly. The amount of politics that Chinese companies can generate is pretty intense and one has to remember, in spite of creating western-style products, this is still an authoritarian Communist régime.
   I can’t even begin to examine what issues Paul faced in the last few weeks but I am interpreting this as SAIC being an impudent bully—we saw some of its tactics with the British during the last year of the MG Rover Group and in its attempts to undermine the bidding process—and the consequences have made life more than tough for him, Zhang Xin (NAC general manager) and, I would guess, Yu Jiang Wei (the chairman) himself. Posted by Jack Yan, 11:09  permalink

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