China calls for home-made auto electronics
(Xinhua)
Updated: 2004-03-24 08:49

China's auto electronics market reached 55 billion yuan (US$6.65 billion) in 2003, but domestic enterprises, including joint ventures, only held less than one-third of the market share.

This huge market, expected to reach 250-300 billion yuan in 2005, has almost been monopolized by foreign companies, according to Economic Information Daily, and experts urged the government to greatly develop China's own auto electronics.

This includes various electronic equipment of controlling, driving, displaying, safety, communication, and entertainment for autos.

"The most profitable business of Motorola in China is not its communication equipment, but auto electronic products," said Zhu Tonghua, of the IT Industry Development and Application Service Institute.

Auto electronics may account for 20 percent of the cost of a middle-class complete vehicle and 50-60 percent of a high-class complete vehicle, said Zhu, and 70 percent of the technical innovation in auto industry comes from auto electronics.

Sun Ping, director of the institute, said that about 1,000 enterprises in China are engaged in auto electronics, but they do not get an upper hand in competition with their foreign rivals, because most of them are producing electronic equipment with low added value, such as sound boxes.

China has in the past paid little attention to developing its own auto electronics or introducing technologies in this respect from other countries. On the other hand, auto electronics, such as auto fittings, must be included into the overall planning of designing a complete vehicle at the very beginning, which is, however, just the weak point of domestics enterprises, according to Sun.

Sun urged the government to make a long-term plan and goal for auto electronics "as soon as possible", adopt some rules and regulations for this industry to provide legal protection for its development, and promote international cooperation with other countries.

Actually, the Ministry of Information Industry has taken auto electronics as a top priority in their work for this year and the ministry, together with the State Development and Reform Commission, is now preparing a development plan for auto electronics, a new industry spanning auto and IT industries, according to Sun.

So far, some local governments including Beijing, north China's Tianjin Municipality and Wuhan, capital of central China's Hubei Province, have listed auto electronics as one of their key regional industries for further development.

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