Few in China knew the private company Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery (STHIM) until it released a deal to buy Hummer from American General Motors in June. STHIM became the center of the spotlight since then in China.
Some background knowledge about Hummer: the civilian off-road vehicle was derived from the military M998 High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (Humvee) by AM General. The model was criticized by many mainly for its poor fuel economy. Due to the soaring price of crude oil, the sale of Hummer dropped from ~82k in 2005 to ~500 in the first five months of this year. Hummer is not the American military’s Humvee and China does not lack military multipurpose vehicle technology since Dongfeng Mengshi developed the People’s Liberation Army’s HMMWV in 2002, which became active in service in 2006.
According to the contract, Tengzhong will only obtain ownership of the brand while keeping the management and factory in US to save about 3000 jobs. The transaction hasn’t been approved by both Chinese and US regulatory agencies and many believe that the bid will probably be blocked by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC, a Chinese government agency). You can also read about this deal on Google News.
What do Chinese think about this business deal online? Sina has a series of reports and experts’ opinions on the sale with over 25k comments in the commenting area. I don’t have time to translate all of them but the following are what I think is representative of the first few pages：
Anonymous mobile user:
People who drive Hummer are insane. This garbage vehicle burns ten times more fuel than average [sarcasm]. I felt disgusted every time I see a Hummer.
1968lozi from Yiyang, Hunan:
[Tengzhong is] collecting garbage.
Willseesoon from Shanghai:
Classic American garbage and they [Tengzhong] treat it like a jewel. How pathetic?
steven_1296 from Shanghai:
No government subsidy should be given. Let them buy with their own money.
Mobile user from Hubei:
Hope they not only buy the brand and licenses but also the technologies.
Mobile user from Zhejiang:
This is a publicity stunt by STHIM. Tengzhong, don’t overdo it to piss off Chinese people.
比来比去 from Beijing:
We worked, we paid and we fed Americans with our blood and sweat!
hanfeiyu from Jiangsu:
150 millions USD to buy a brand? Is that helping US to solve its unemployment?
wuzhongquan777 from Xi’an, Shanxi:
US recently placed tariff on Chinese tires, installed inspection on Chinese seamless steel pipes, and these traitors sent 800-2000 millions USD to America only for a brand? I hate it so much. Taxation department should inspect how much tax they evaded. Even though they paid with their own money, Tengzhong should take certain level of social responsibility.
If we don’t block the deal ASAP, it will definitely be passed when Obama comes to China in November. We should boycott Tengzhong together.
adongdong222 from Shanghai:
BYD bought Qinchuan to start making cars so it’s normal for Tenzhong to buy Hummer too. They are just as crazy as the Automobile Insane Li Shu-Fu. BYD wouldn’t make Flyer as their flagship and Tengzhong wouldn’t make H2, H3 as their flagship either. Hummer sedan will be the focus. Hummer is a Chinese brand now.
m1010662581 from Sichuan:
It’s worth it if the assembly line is moved to China. Senior management team and PR department can be left in US, in order to reduce the political pressure from both sides to minimum.
ans88 from Hebei:
Besides mysterious owner and mysterious funding, the company is changing its boss secretly. I seriously doubt the funding is legal. Is there any money laundering involved?
Xcdvbf from Hubei:
I don’t care what the reason this SB company has for buying Hummer, the [money-sucking] black hole. I only want to know where its 800 to 2000 million funds comes from and which bank swallowed the poison pill.
花风源 from Chengdu, Sichuan:
China should have its own ICAC-like agency to monitor capital flow.
Mobile user from Shanxi:
Market economy, free development, all bulls**t.
Image Credit: Sina.com
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Sofa. Enjoy the trash. Worthless brand that only appeals to people who need to overcompensate. I want to pity the Chinese company’s ignorance, but as several of their posters are saying, where did they get the money from hmmm? Hard to feel pity for a corrupt company. And I’m sure the luxury kiddies and chubs will eat the products up, if they aren’t already. “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure” seems to only be half applicable here.
they don’t have the money, they will need to get a loan from the bank, that’s what I heard.
Let ‘em have the Hummers! Its the perfect model to represent the careless attitude towards irresponsible environmental and economic lifestyles. Pass on the torch to the newcomers.
Dispite the Hummer being a piece of trash I think it will actually be quite successful in China. After all they aren’t selling a vehicle, they’re selling face.
The Chinese posters are absolutely on the money. This is one shit deal being flogged off by the US. I wouldnt even give one of these things to Pusan Playa or Jason Chinese.
However, I have seen them converted in Chinese crowd management vehicles complete with water cannons and CCTV. So I suppose they have a function after all.
The sooner people in China realise that a car is just and A to B thing the better. Face, dick extensions and fuck the environment will nonetheless be the selling point…its just sad. Meanwhile, AM execs must be pissing themselves laughting over martinis. Must be payback for all those toasters and flat screen TVs sold to the home of the brave.
Anyone know the details of the sale? I’d say good for Tengzhong, but I’ve got the feeling they paid too much.
when you are talking little dicks, i guess it includes vietnamese,thiland,japanese and korean and all of asian ppl.
I know elephant and donkey’s dick are huge, but they r just donkey, you r really a dumb ass
I just heard $150 million, less than 1/3 of what GM wanted.
As many have said- I said good, let it go, Hummer is a perfect brand for the asshole Chinese nouveau riches. Last Hummer I saw was a yellow one, driven by a douchebag who, instead of simply waiting to come to the intersection, pulled into the bike line and streetside parking so that he wouldn’t have to wait his turn at the stop sign. Car and driver would’ve been right home in China.
150 million…is actually not that expensive for a company like hummer….
I am more interested in the amount of debt hummer have accumulated…
I can’t help but have a suspicion that soon the chengguan will have their hands on Hummers….
I hate to say it because I think Hummers are one of the least responsible, least necessary vehicles around and because they people that own them tend to be of the “small man” variety and because I generally like Chinese people but I think there is a large segment of the Chinese population that will love these things made in China and will snap them up.
Crawling through traffic, burning enough fuel to fund a Saudi prince’s jet, taking up the parking space of multiple vehicles, spewing the pollutants of several vehicles… really nothing could more clearly say “I have a very small penis”.
i like it.. right car for my cocubines..
People, people, people…please don’t bash something that you haven’t experience. The Hummer is the ultimate road experience. It’s the experience of a lifetime. There’s more power in that vehicle than any Chinese dictator and the car will take on any obstacles. It can get you from 0 to 60 mph…oops, I mean kilometers per hour before a Chinese revolution. The interior is luxurious with leather all around and with chrome bumper to boot. For the ultimate entertainment, experience the thrill of running over a Hyundai on a Chinese road and you won’t even feel a thing.
Yes, it is available to you today and now. Buy it before it’s all gone. And 0% financing.
I prefer a Great Wall SUV!
I prefer the Red Flag SUV
I prefer the Cayenne
“Hyundai on a Chinese road and you won’t even feel a thing”
I can’t trust that statement when a hummer was crushed by a schoolbus.
You don’t have reading comprehension do you? America CREATED the damn thing (and Lincolns, Cadillacs which are pretty boss!) so there’s no doubt who is ‘over-compensating’ here.
People shouldn’t call it trash because it’s American, you should call it trash simply because that’s what it is. Trash. Doing so, makes you, trash yourself and we shouldn’t be like this.
If a hummer is used for what it was meant to be in the past, it’s useful. If you drive it in Shanghai/Beijing/Nanjing or any other place in any other time but when it snows. It would be absolutely useless.
U.S. superheroes really exist, they can sell wind millions of dollars.
The Hummers has always been owned by Cracker/Jew boys with little dicks. Although it will be own by a Chinese company, the car will still be produce in America so it can continue to satisfy these little White dicks inferior complex.
Hey, thousands of years ago china was a rich prosperous nation. A few centuries later they traded all of that in so they could become a bunch of worthless opium addicts. Now that china is once again a rich (although you couldn’t tell by how dirty it looks) nation they are about to trade it all in to become a bunch of conspicuous consumption addicts. Who says history never repeats itself?
You know, there was this war between England and China, and as a result of losing China had to accept England’s opium for trade. It was called the Opium War. It was a devastating loss for China that has ramifications to this day.
Dude, China didn’t “trade it all in” back then, and also aren’t going to do it again now. Stop your wishful thinking.
Wait. China had both a numerical advantage, a home field advantage, and a long military history. Further more the Chinese invented gun powder as any Chinese will tell you ad nauseum and yet they lost to tiny little England? More like they just gave in.
Dude, what ramifications are you talking about? The huge trade surplus? China has thousands of jobs that were American jobs just a decade or two before and an army of netizens (hackers) dying to cover for any illegal or immoral acts the Chinese government commits. Please spare me. Japan lost a war and had two nukes dropped on them a little over 60 years ago, they seem to be doing alright. The opium “wars” was thousands of years ago.
Wishful thinking? No man, wishful thinking is when you watch a small group of Chinese making a fortune off of the backs of the extremely poor majority, spending the money on some hand me down white elephants like Hummer instead of improving the lives of the very workforce that put china in its current place and thinking, and then expecting it all to work itself out. Wishful thinking is when you think Hummer will open the doors to the US car market when it appears that the US market has been shifting away from cars like Hummer for a while now.
chinese ecolo are in bad Hummer
Sichuan Tengzhong could have gotten it for even less money. No one wants to buy this garbage brand. Maybe ST just wanted the technology.
Dudes, the Chinese are buying the Hummer for various business reasons. First, they might be able to still make money by selling it to the new wave of rich Chinese. Second, intellectual property. They are getting rights to designs and manufacturing methods. Sure, intellectual property means shit in China, but if the Chinese are going to sell anything automotive overseas, they have to have original ideas. Third, by keeping the plants and jobs in the U.S., the Chinese can tap into the engineering pool with extensive experiences in automotive design and manufacturing.
Sure, Americans make crappy cars comparing with the Japanese and Europeans, but it’s much better than Chinese car makers. And buying Hummer at that price is a cheap way for the Chinese to step up their game.
I didn’t even know that the deal went entirely through. I thought the Chinese govt still needed to approve the deal. Giving a car like that to a rich mainland chinese is like giving a car to a woman. First of all, most mainland chinese have bad taste in cars. They love VW’s and buicks. They don’t know how to maintain cars. There aren’t too many mainland chinese out there that even know how to do something as simple as change a car’s oil. If you’ve been in China long enough, you know that everyone drives like assholes.
most rich chinese ppl are drivin ferrari’s, porsches, 7 series, mercs, A8 blah blah..why would they drive vw & buicks for?
i do agree with you on 1 thing tho..in china everyone drives like assholes haha
china has a bigger picture & that is run america down into the ground. american’s only see the dollar value of things.
Hummer used to be popular when the gas prices were cheap. A long came the global financial crisis. GM can’t afford to keep a brand which was borne out of a military programme. Hopefully the new owners will make it more fuel efficient and go down to the smaller end of the market. Hummer vehicles are still a small segment of the big auto market. The trend for consumers is to go for fuel efficient smaller cars.
For once I agree with Pusan Playa. Hyundais are good cheaper versions of Hondas and will probably outsell them in time. Reliable, cheap and fuel efficient, even if PP drives the brochure and not the actual motor.
IMO, the hummer will be more of an asset to the military. CN humvee’s will be protecting China from any and all dangers!!! (probably sell cheaper versions of the hummer to every country in the world also)
Because you couldn’t make a real Hummer, all you can do is make cheap knock-off versions of American and other Western products. Way to go! LOL
[Note from Fauna: Comments under different names (GO CAPITALISM, lol/LOL, Capitalist Pig, COMMUNISM SUCKS, Counterfeit Eggs, Capitalism Rocks Communism Sucks, & BRING HER TO JUSTICE).]
US Hummer sales have been crashing. 2008 numbers were about 27K. Thru September 2009, sales have been just over 8K. If this trend continues, we’re looking at 12K tops, this year. That’s a 50% year-to-year fall in sales.
From Forbes:
Hummer doesn’t need to sell many vehicles worldwide to be profitable. If it sold only 10,000 cars at an average price of $50,000 apiece, it would rake in $500 million in revenue. Last year Hummer sold 27,485 vehicles in the U.S., according to Automotive News, and in 2007 it sold 55,986. Through September of this year, though, it had only sold 8,193 units to American customers.
The bottom line is that whatever Hummer takes in must outpace the high production costs Tengzhong would incur. The terms of the deal mandate that it must keep Hummer’s factories in the U.S. for at least two years, where costs are higher and restrictions more stringent, as well as retain 3,000 U.S. employees who are paid far larger salaries than factory workers in China earn.
Tengzhong has said it wants to produce and market a lighter, more fuel-efficient Hummer model, one that would both meet Beijing-mandated environmental standards and not incur such high taxes when it is imported from the U.S. Besides shrinking the size of the car and its engine, Tengzhong could also repurpose the hulking vehicles for commercial, agricultural or military use.
Assuming a Chinese plant can eventually be opened, I expect a lot of government agencies to buy this vehicle. It’s a nice-looking vehicle that has all the comforts of a car.