Views on China | Chinese Consumers Prefer Chinese Brands

Akio Toyoda has China on his mind. On Tuesday, the same day he announced record earnings, the Toyota Motors president warned of a sharp slowdown in the world’s biggest market, echoing concerns already aired by BMW.
But another development in China may spell even more trouble for global automakers: a USD21,700 Land Rover lookalike manufactured domestically. A sport utility vehicle bearing an uncanny resemblance to the Evoque model goes on sale this week at a third the sticker price of the original, and it’s already racking up thousands of pre-orders.
Jaguar Land Rover’s Ralf Speth has railed at the rise of China’s “copy-and-paste” auto industry. But complaining is all the CEO and his peers can do as China continues churning out ever more clones of cars, electronics, appliances and clothes originally designed in other countries.
The prevailing opinion in boardrooms from New York to Frankfurt to Tokyo has long been that China, which is minting new millionaires at the fastest rate in history and creating a massive middle class, will be easy prey for established brands with expertise in hawking goods to higher-income consumers. The richer mainlanders get, multinational companies presumed, the more they will want Burberry in the closet, Rolex on the wrist and Lexus in the driveway.
What CEOs didn’t anticipate is mainland Chinese consumers’ penchant for labels saying “Made by China” (if not “Made in China”). As analyst Thomas Gatley of GaveKal Dragonomics argues in a new report, multinationals may already be losing Chinese consumers they thought were theirs for the taking. “There are now signs that local Chinese companies are capturing much of the gains from this new stage of consumer spending – a worrying development for multinationals counting on China growth,” Gatley finds.
The all-important automobile market is emblematic of the trend. Many of China’s nouveau riche aspire to own an SUV, which should be great news for the Toyota’s, Daimler’s and Ford’s of the world. But in the early phases of China’s SUV boom, the companies that flourished were foreign manufacturers with local joint ventures. Sales for those companies jumped more than 70 percent in 2013 alone. Shanghai Volkswagen’s Tiguan, for example, remains the second-best-selling SUV on the mainland. Meanwhile, domestic companies are beginning to catch up. In the first half of 2015, sales of Chinese-branded SUVs rose roughly 30 percent versus 12 percent for foreign names. From January to June, six of China’s 10 best-selling SUVs were domestic.
One can debate why mainland consumers are flocking to names like Great Wall Motors, JAC Motors, Chang’An Automobile Group and Landwind (maker of the Land Rover lookalike). Value? Familiarity? Nationalist instincts? There’s probably no single answer – just as with the many Americans who only buy American-made cars.
“What’s even more surprising,” Gatley points out, “is that the domestic brands seem to have gained market share without cutting their margins to the bone in a ruinous zero-sum game.” If corporate China has indeed cracked the code of offering the right mix of style, quality and price, multinational executives like Akio Toyoda are in for a bumpy decade.
Are there other sectors at such a tipping point? Recent sales figures from Japan’s Shisedo and Anglo-Dutch Unilever bear out the findings of a July 1 Bain report that “local brands gained share over foreign competitors for the third year in a row.” Last year, local brands gained share in 18 of the 26 market-access categories Bain studies, growing an average 10 percent versus 3 percent by foreign brands that gained ground in only eight categories.
The rapid inroads made in China by domestic smartphone makers like Xiaomi, for example, suggest danger ahead for international brands. There’s a very real risk that the emergence of Chinese consumers will be more of a local story than a global one. Overseas companies that take them for granted do so at their own peril. William Pesek