In the early morning of February 11, Lin Qiangsheng walked back and forth in the guest room of the hotel, looking at his watch from time to time, and his heart was very anxious at this time.

The delegation has one day to go, and the visit to Wèn is coming to an end. The group members are free to move for another day, and there are two days left in total. However, Lin Qiangsheng has not yet reached an agreement with Peugeot, and he is about to return to China, but the two sides have a disagreement on the production line of the Weighton factory.

Peugeot did not agree with Mr. Lin to move production back to China, as more than 3,000 workers at the Ryden plant would lose their jobs. And this year is another British election year, and Peugeot does not want to make a bad impression on the next British government during this critical period!

They demanded that Mr. Lin keep the production line in the UK so that more than 3,000 workers could continue to work.

After difficult consideration, Lin Qiangsheng agreed to Peugeot's request. Although this means that the factory is still under Peugeot's control, he also knows that the British election year is a very chaotic period, and it is best not to cause any trouble in the UK during this period, otherwise both British civil society organizations and government agencies will target him!

Lin Qiangsheng doesn't want the impulsive British civil society to hate him!

But he still couldn't get along with Bregley and said that if he was to keep working with more than 3,000 workers, he would have to continue to produce cars, but now Peugeot didn't want Mr. Lin to use their resurrected Talbot brand. In addition, Peugeot was worried about the quality problems after Lin Johnson took over, and did not agree with him to continue to use the sales network of the Rootes Group.

If so, then the old models produced by the Ryden factory, the Avenger, the Simka Horizon, the Alpine and Solara Solara, who he sold to!

Lin Qiangsheng knew that Peugeot was pulling himself, just to let himself fall into a tired pull, anyway, Peugeot's senior management issued an order just to move his mouth, and an order could make Lin Qiangsheng go from expectation to disappointment, and from disappointment to expectation, so he tormented him repeatedly.

Lin Qiangsheng has nothing to do about this situation, who makes him really want the equipment of that factory!

In the past, Lin Qiangsheng always thought that Peugeot was the second in the French car industry, but recently he finally understood what kind of giant company he was dealing with, and it turned out that this is the well-deserved leading brother of the French automobile industry!

In 1976, Peugeot officially acquired Citroën, which became the predecessor of PSA (Peugeot Citroën Group). Peugeot GUÒ exchanged shares with Michelin to acquire 90% of Citroen's shares, forming a new structure of a holding company with several subsidiaries.

The PSA Peugeot Citroën Group is a privately owned French car manufacturing company owned by the Peugeot Motor Company and owns the Peugeot and Citroen car brands. In Europe, PSA Peugeot Citroën Group is the second largest car manufacturer in Europe after Volkswagen of Germany and the seventh largest car manufacturer in the world.

It turned out that Lin Qiangsheng thought that Citroen was an independent company, but after really understanding it, he learned that Citroen had already been acquired by Peugeot.

In 1977, Peugeot introduced the all-new Peugeot 305. The Peugeot 305 uses three engines, namely a four-cylinder 8-valve engine with a displacement of 1290cc (maximum power 48.5kw/6000rpm, maximum torque 94N.m/ 3750rpm, compression ratio 8.8:1), and a four-cylinder 8-valve engine with a displacement of 1472cc (maximum power 55.2kw/6000rpm, maximum torque/3000rpm. compression ratio 9.2:1) and a 1,580cc engine (maximum power 70.1kW at 6,000 rpm, maximum torque at 3,750 rpm, compression ratio 9.5:1) for GT models.

In 1978, PSA acquired Chrysler's three subsidiaries in France, the United Kingdom and Spain, and acquired Chrysler's European brands and models.

In 1979, Peugeot introduced a diesel turbo engine for the first time on the 604, the first time such a model was sold in the European market. In July, Peugeot acquired the rights to use the Talbot trademark after acquiring Sima AG, and Peugeot decided to use the brand to sell the products of its former Chrysler European subsidiary.

From this series of events, it can be seen that Peugeot is in the rising period of its career.

The British automobile industry during this period, on the other hand, was a very heavy topic in itself, with too many bankruptcies and restructurings, mergers and acquisitions, layoffs and shutdowns, strikes and destruction. Each topic involves the struggle between life and death, like a nightmare that accompanied Great Britain as it stumbled through the 20th century, from an empire on which the sun never sets, back to an island nation on the edge of Eurasia.

People who know a little about British cars will probably know about the Leyland Group, but not many people know about Rootes. Rootes is not a car brand, but a conglomerate, which first started in car sales, becoming the largest car and truck seller in the UK in 1924, and then began to acquire a number of local British car brands. Hillman, Humber, Singer, Sunbean, Talbot, Conmler, Karrier, etc. have all been its sub-brands.

At the same time, rootes is also the founder of the "same platform" strategy (not strictly speaking, it is not called "same platform", its English term is badgeengineering, that is, the overall packaging of the project and so on). In its brand system, Hillman is an entry-level brand that takes the mass route; Singer is an intermediate position; Sunbeam focuses on sports brands; Humber belongs to luxury brands; The MER and Karrier are in the commercial vehicle category. Famous models are Hillmanminx, HillmanHunter, Humbersnipe, Sunbeamalpine.

The owner of the then-automotive empire, William Rootes, was arguably the first practitioner of the multi-brand strategy of automobiles in 1935, but he also made a foolish mistake: when he came to the Volkswagen factory in Germany after the war to do a post-war compensation assessment, he thought that the things there were worthless, including the Beetle. During World War II, Rootes built bombers and military vehicles based on Humber and Mer for the British, and exported automotive technology to Australia and other Middle Eastern countries after the war.

Iran's car production technology was exported by the Rootes company in the 70s.

There are many reasons for who ruined such a business, but they are all inseparable from the British government. In order to compete with the main rival at the time, BMC Group's mini, Rooms designed a similarly sized Hillmanlmp, but the British government forced them to open a new production line in Lynnwood, Scotland, in order to balance the development of the various regions of the UK. Due to the poor local production conditions and the lack of experience of local workers, as well as the steep increase in logistics costs, coupled with the large cost of investing in the factory, Rootes was financially strapped in an instant. In the end, the model failed, and production was affected by successive strikes at the Lynnwood plant.

This is just the beginning of the decline of the rootes. Largely at the same time that things were not going well at the Lynnwood plant, the supply chain crisis at London-based body supplier BLSP exacerbated the deterioration of Rootes' operations. In the mid-to-late '60s, Chrysler began to gradually acquire the ailing British giant. In Chrysler's huge European strategy, Rootes gradually became an ordinary pawn, because the parent company also acquired France's Simka and Spain's Barreiros, and under the halo of Chrysler Europe, the original brands of Rooms began to disappear one by one.

Chrysler's European strategy proved to be ultimately unsuccessful: sales of Rootes' products in the U.S. fell through due to the inability to meet emissions requirements; The IMP project was a complete failure in 1976; Plans to merge Rootes and Simka have run aground, and the two companies simply have no resources or technology to share. Eventually, Chrysler was unable to improve the much-maligned British automaker due to a fire in the backyard of the U.S. market, which was outdated in technology, poor reliability, outdated in terms of involvement, and outdated concepts...... Under the tide of globalization, each one is a fatal wound.

In 1978, Chrysler Europe declared bankruptcy, the French PSA group bought the surplus value, and Peugeot took over all Chrysler's brands and technologies in Europe. The closure of the plant in Scotland, the reactivation of the Talbot brand, and the transfer of commercial vehicles to Renault were radical reforms immediately after PSA took over. Since its arrival at Peugeot, the former Rootes plant in Leiden has never played a major role in Peugeot's global strategy, it is merely an assembly plant.