"Do you want a market, or do you want technology?"

The original joint venture project negotiated with Zhonghua Group has changed, but now Zhonghua Group intends to acquire a tire factory in China, and has asked Continental AG (the owner of Continental tires) to transfer new technology to build China's largest tire project together.

Market for technology is a long-standing slogan in China's auto industry.

Now it's the turn of the continental bloc to choose this question.

Originally, it was only necessary to set up a joint venture factory, with Continental managing and operating, and Zhonghua Group taking a stake in the company to share the profits. But now, if you want to make a joint venture, you must come up with new chips to come to power, otherwise Han Hao will consider finding another suitable company to enter the game.

At a time when international first-line tire brands have entered China, such as Michelin building a factory in Hujiang City, Bridgestone putting into production in Jinmen City, Goodyear settling in Bincheng City, and Continental is a latecomer.

In order to seize this fast-growing market, Continental had to make a move. Now a big opportunity is in front of them, which is to take out real money to join the Jiangzhou tire project.

"China's automotive market has a lot of potential, and as long as we get involved, we can get a lot of orders. The only condition is to come up with technology to make a joint venture with a Chinese factory and bind Zhonghua Group as a long-term customer.

Personally, I would recommend not to miss this great opportunity, as Continental tires are a niche product in China, and we have to pay a certain price to gain a foothold. ”

This was stated by the head of Continental Tyre's China region in a report to the German headquarters.

"Judging from the advice given by the consulting company, Zhonghua Group is a Chinese A-level partner, and their joint venture project with BMW is very smooth, which is conducive to the integration of our two parties.

Now the major OEMs have strategic partners in the field of tires in China, and as a latecomer, we must seize the leaders of China's own brands. To become a strategic partner of Zhonghua Group, at least we can enter the Chinese market and make sure that we can make a profit without losing money. ”

The meaning is very clear, China's tire market has been carved up almost completely, and many foreign car brands will bring corresponding tire companies. Although Horse has a good reputation in the world, it is a latecomer in China, and it may not even be able to take a sip of soup if it doesn't come in.

In the end, Continental succumbed to the huge market of China and agreed to Han Hao's request for technology transfer to bring world-class tire technology to China.

So far, Jiangzhou has another super-large investment promotion project, with the investment amount of Zhongce Continental joint venture project reaching 2.2 billion yuan, and the annual production capacity of tires has exceeded 7 million. Among them, 400,000 self-repairing tires are exclusively for BMW, and 800,000 silent tires are available. The equity ratio of the joint venture is divided 50:50 between China and foreign countries, and the general model of automobile joint ventures is adopted. Some of the tires produced at the joint venture plant will be exported to the outside world, thereby reducing the global cost of Continental tyres.

In addition, Germany's Continental Group will also invest 1.5 billion yuan in Zhongce Rubber to obtain a 20% stake, while Zhonghua Group will take a 51% controlling stake through the transfer of state-owned shares. The transaction was completed in half cash and half in equity, and China Group actually injected 1.8 billion yuan. There is also a new shareholder, Sinopec, who has also taken a 6% stake in the shares, hoping to become an upstream supplier.

The high-end tire market focuses on the Continental brand, and the low-end uses the Chaoyang brand, so as to kill China's tire market. According to the plan, the number of tires of the two major brands of Continental and Chaoyang, as well as automobiles and motorcycles, will exceed 25 million and become the largest tire manufacturer in China.

According to Han Hao's plan, the newly established Zhongce Rubber Group will be listed independently in the future and become another Chinese listed company.

It is precisely because of the listing exit channel that Continental AG will not hesitate to invest a lot of money, and once the listing is successful, they will get rich benefits.

"Our cooperation is a win-win situation and we will grow together with the Chinese auto market. ”

Han Hao said so little to the top management of the German Continental Group.

At present, the major international automobile giants are divided into two camps in the treatment of the parts industry chain.

First, the main engine factories in Europe and the United States, such as Volkswagen and General Motors, divest their own parts companies and emphasize the market competition mechanism as the basis. They no longer exclusively designate parts brands, but shop around in the market, and whoever has the highest cost performance will use whom's goods.

In this way, it is easy to stimulate competition and give parts companies the motivation to increase innovation and technological progress. But it also brings a new problem, that is, the main engine factory often selects two to three companies to supply a part, and it is easy to pass on the cost pressure to the parts factory, requiring it to reduce prices and control costs. In order to win the bid, parts factories often reduce prices or even bid at a loss, which eventually leads to problems such as quality decline.

The second is the main engine factories based on Japan and South Korea, such as Toyota and Hyundai, who like to invest in parts companies and build an integrated industrial chain with property rights as a link system.

The advantage of this is that it is easy to control parts manufacturers, and can also obtain more industrial chain profits, and the most important thing is that the initiative is in their own hands and will not be choked by others. The disadvantage is the lack of competition, which can easily lead to the lack of innovation motivation of parts and components enterprises, the formation of related transactions, which is not conducive to the establishment of a transparent procurement system.

At this stage, Han Hao still plans to learn the second way, open up the automotive industry chain, master the core technology, and take the initiative in his own hands.

European and American automobile OEMs are developing to a certain stage before they will have the strength and qualifications to abandon related parts enterprises, and Zhonghua Group has not yet reached this level.

Like the previous supply of automatic transmissions that were stuck by Aisin, it almost made the Chunghwa Group lose its automatic transmission models.

Therefore, Zhonghua Group is still in the entrepreneurial stage, and it needs to control the reserves of various key technology fields and increase the layout in the automotive industry chain.

Focusing on the current tires, interiors, CVTs and engines, and looking to the future of new energy batteries, chip technology, Internet applications, etc., are all to make Zhonghua Group have independent strength, and there is no need to look at people's faces in the future.

At a time when automatic transmissions are becoming more and more mainstream in the future, even giants like Volkswagen are desperately developing dual-clutch automatic transmissions, just to no longer be controlled by Aisin AT transmissions. You must know that Volkswagen and Toyota can fight fiercely in the global auto market, and both sides are sprinting to the throne with all their strength, wanting to pull GM and Ford down.

When competing for the throne of the world's first place in the future, once Toyota secretly makes small moves, Volkswagen will not be able to eat and go around. Strategically, Volkswagen must have its own dual-clutch transmission, even if it is the first to eat crabs. Like turbocharged engines for large-scale civilian use, even if there is a problem, it is worth the price.

When it comes to dual-clutch transmissions, GETRAG, a former partner of Zhonghua Group, is not doing well in the Chinese market at present.

Because the research and development of dual-clutch automatic transmissions has not been fruitful, and the technology of manual transmissions is relatively low, many Chinese auto independent brands have developed their own or purchased domestic products, so their MT product supply has been declining year by year.

This is really a big irony, if it wasn't for the breakup of Getrag at the time, it is estimated that Zhonghua Group would continue to develop dual-clutch transmissions with him, and would not devote all its efforts to CVT research and development.

Now that the Chunghwa Group has its own automatic transmission technology and plans to acquire ZF's CVT, Getrag, which is also part of Germany, has not been able to come up with its own automatic transmission products.

At that time, at the Capital Auto Show, when Zhonghua Group exhibited its CVT products for the first time, the senior management of GETRAG came to take a closer look, and finally had to admit that they had missed China's most potential partner.

Otherwise, under the premise of continuing to work with Zhonghua Group to increase research on dual-clutch technology, maybe its own dual-clutch transmission has been developed.

It's useless to regret it now, Getrag tried to continue to contact the Zhonghua Group, asking if the other party was still interested in continuing to cooperate in the development of the dual-clutch, but Han Hao refused.

Good horses don't eat back grass, Zhonghua Group already has its own CVT, and it will not consider dual-clutch for the time being. Even Volkswagen, which has been advocating dual-clutch technology, has failed to launch mass-produced dual-clutch transmission products, and Han Hao intends to wait and see what happens.

In addition, Han Hao's rejection of the dual-clutch project was due to the good news from the AT project team within Zhonghua Group, and they successfully copied a 3AT test prototype.