Chinese It's too dark! Akio Toyoda bombarded Chinese dealers to raise prices, Japan makes cars in China to make money?
Zhiyi Auto/Zhang Xuanmo
When it comes to Japanese cars, I believe that many consumers will unconsciously think of the "Big Three". In the eighties and nineties of the last century, they won the love of a large number of consumers with advanced fuel drive technology, durable quality and economical cost of use. Explosive models such as Honda CR-V, Toyota Corolla, Nissan Xuanyi and so on are still the "dream car" of many people until now. However, because Japanese cars need to go through many operations to enter the domestic market, it gives some dealers the opportunity to make profits from it.
Akio Toyoda, the head of the Toyota brand, once complained about this, "A car with a purchase price of 300,000 yuan, Chinese dealers dare to double the price to sell to one million, it is too dark." "A land cruiser with a purchase price of hundreds of thousands, the Lexus LX5700, can be transformed into a million-class luxury car as long as it arrives in China, which is really jaw-dropping."
As an established Japanese car company, Toyota has a number of popular best-selling models, and price increases are very common. For example, Lexus series products, generally need to add 20,000 or 30,000 to start. Not to mention the "king of markups" Alpha, the sales terminal can often be at a premium of two or three hundred thousand. Even so, there are still many Chinese people who flock to it and are highly sought after. The strong demand for cars has led some dealers to see an opportunity to accumulate money, using import tariffs as an excuse to destroy the market and even steal conceptual markups.
Although dealers have raised the price of cars to a certain extent, it is unreasonable to blame them for all the fault. Previously, overseas media repeatedly asked about the issue of price increases in the Chinese market in interviews, to which Akio Toyoda responded twice and argued:
"Toyota has never sold any Alpha to Chinese dealers at a markup, and it has nothing to do with the Toyota Group." In one sentence, the relationship was completely cleared and the spearhead was directly aimed at domestic distributors.
However, this is not the case. Some insiders reacted that Toyota may openly say that it cannot restrain the price increase, but behind the scenes, it is not ruled out that there is a suspicion of fueling. For example, Toyota's strong performance in the auto market is an open secret in the industry, and dealers almost need to unconditionally abide by Toyota's rules, otherwise it is difficult to get supplies. If you want to get a blockbuster model, the dealer must have several models that are not selling well at the same time. As a result, dealers had to raise prices to make up for losses on low-volume models. In addition to the violent binding method of "get a good car and match a few bad cars", Toyota will also maintain the price of luxury cars by limiting production.
On December 27, 2019, the Anti-Monopoly Bureau of the State Administration for Market Regulation issued a fine of up to 87.613 million yuan to Toyota (China) Investment Co., Ltd. After investigation by the regulatory authorities, it was found that Toyota's Lexus brand had monopolistic behaviors such as unifying dealer quotations and limiting the minimum price of goods transferred by dealers.
This form of strategy at the expense of consumers not only makes consumers bear high car prices, but also undermines market fairness. To solve this problem, we should start from two main aspects.
First of all, the relevant departments should further improve the system, prevent some dealers from increasing prices in disguise through "stealing concepts" and "opportunistic", improve their professional level and market awareness, and require consumer-centric operations.
Secondly, automobile manufacturers should strictly require themselves, formulate reasonable price strategies according to production capacity conditions, avoid large market fluctuations, and provide a good "first lock" for malicious speculation and price gouging.
All in all, selling cars at a markup has become an urgent problem to be solved at present. Toyoda himself also admitted earlier that the unreasonableness of Toyota's pricing in the Chinese market greatly exceeds the foreign price. As consumers, we need to see both the superficial reasons and the deeper reasons behind them. When buying a car, compare more, in the case that the quality of domestic cars is not inferior to foreign countries, we may as well support it. Only in this way can domestic car companies be encouraged to continuously improve their independent innovation capabilities and improve the research and development, production and other links of automobiles.
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