The spice of life

Just saw the news that China’s Geely officially is now the owner of Volvo for a 1.8 billion dollar transaction from Ford. I remember seeing Geely’s founder, Mr. Li on a television interview in 2003 and really like his entrepreneurial spirit. What he said left an impression “How hard is it to make a car ? It’s a couple of couches, 4 tires, an engine and a shell.” This is his response to the naysers back then, people in China were highly skeptical of how this farmer from a village is going to start building his own cars in China and selling it. Today, he proved his doubters wrong. An interesting part is, there’s still a lot of people who doubt Mr.Li is going to make the merger a success. Well, I think if Volvo became a Chinese company, it would certainly motivate a huge untapped overseas Chinese market. For example, the overseas Koreans overwhelmingly drive Hyundais and the Japanese will drive a Toyota or Honda, but the overseas Chinese population has never had a brand it can show its nationalism to. Now, there is Volvo, a brand that represents European technology and the highest safety standard in the automobile industry. This fits well with the Chinese culture, I would be really surprised if Geely doesn’t take advantage of this huge untapped market and reap the benefits both domestically and in the North American market.