Rebirth of England

But there is no need for Barron to make such a big concession for nothing, because acquiring the next factory is not as simple as taking over the employees of those factories. It also involves the pension issues of some employees who are about to reach retirement age, and if there is a price increase, If so, then we still have to talk, and they definitely need the Volkswagen Group to make up for it in other aspects.

Now Caesar Fund is negotiating with Volkswagen Group and Ford at the same time, and it depends on which side can get results first.

At the same time, Li Lu's progress back to China was not slow. She quickly sent a list of current local automobile manufacturers in China, which included a list of some car brands that could be acquired.

Among them, there are those who have automobile production licenses, and there are also those who do not have automobile production licenses and risk production. In fact, in the early days, it was difficult for private car brands to obtain this qualification, including the later well-known Chinese domestic car brands. Chery and Geely, at the beginning, manufactured cars and sold them "secretly" without obtaining this qualification.

Of course, if Tianhe Capital wants to acquire, it will only choose companies with automobile production licenses.

In this list, there are small-scale automobile companies such as Hongxing Automobile, which has been acquired, Tianma Automobile, which is not profitable, and Songliao Automobile, a listed company...

However, Barron didn't pay much attention to all of this, but focused his attention on...

"What? You want to acquire Nanjing Automobile?"

"Yes, Nanjing Automobile Group is the most suitable company in terms of scale and technical strength."

After hearing Barron's affirmative words, Li Lu hesitated for a moment on the phone and said:

"But I'm afraid that won't be easy, because Nanjing Automobile Group is currently in conflict with China's number one automobile group, SAIC Motor, and since this company is now a state-owned enterprise run by Jiangsu Province, given their size, I'm afraid It won’t be so easy to be acquired..."

"We have to give it a try. Nanjing Auto is in a very bad situation now. In addition, in the conflict with SAIC, they do not have the upper hand. It is still possible to accept the acquisition..."

There is still one sentence that Barron did not say directly. After all, with the glorious history of Nanjing Automobile, it is slightly easier to accept being acquired by an "outsider" like Tianhe Capital than being acquired by SAIC at a low price.

Nanjing Automobile once manufactured China's first light truck and was called SAIC's "big brother" - when SAIC was still manufacturing tractors, Nanjing Automobile's trucks were already selling well across the country.

In the field of passenger cars, Nanjing Automobile also has a joint venture, Nanjing Automobile Iveco, which is well-known in China.

However, after entering the car field, Nanjing Automobile failed miserably in the field of developing small cars. The sales volume of many cars it developed never met expectations, and they all ended in disastrous failures.

The conflict between Nanjing Automobile and SAIC is because last year, Nanjing Automobile made a desperate move to acquire the bankrupt British traditional car brand Rover for 53 million pounds due to its failure in the car field, inheriting all its assets and technologies, including the MG brand.

Before Nanjing Automobile acquired Rover, SAIC had already spent 67 million pounds to acquire a complete set of intellectual property rights and technology platforms for Rover 75, 25 and other models. SAIC established the Roewe brand with this authorization.

In other words, Rover sold itself to two buyers and sold itself twice, which led to unclear intellectual property rights and the dispute between Nanjing Auto and SAIC.

However, although Nanjing Automobile is the "big brother" of SAIC in terms of qualifications, it is no longer what it used to be.

First of all, the acquisition of Rover Motors caused a lot of headaches for Nanjing Automobile, because it apparently spent 53 million pounds to acquire Rover, but in fact, they invested 3 billion in the operation of this acquisition. Chinese dollars, and tens of billions of Chinese dollars will be needed for later digestion...

However, in the sedan field, Nanjing Automobile has successively launched Ingels, New Arto, Fiat (products of Nanjing Automobile's joint venture Nanjing Automobile Fiat), and even MG launched after acquiring Rover, but the market sales are not satisfactory.

This caused Nanjing Automobile to fall into a financial dilemma at this time, and it was no longer able to do research and development in the car field.

SAIC has become the leading local car company in China and is in an advantageous position in the competition between the two companies.

Barron knew that the conflict between the two sides ended with SAIC's acquisition of Nanjing Automobile at the end of 2007 in the original time and space. But now, he is ready to join the battle and acquire Nanjing Automobile from SAIC.

Of course, he also knows that this operation will not be easy. After all, SAIC and Nanjing Automobile are both state-owned enterprises in China. When the upper management does not want the two sides to fight and cause internal friction, it is easy to achieve mergers and acquisitions and reorganization with a little push.

But he also knew that as early as the Spring Festival in 2003, the China National Development and Reform Commission had brought the leaders of SAIC and Nanjing Automobile together, hoping that the two sides could reorganize, but in the end nothing happened.

This shows that Nanjing Automobile itself did not want to be swallowed up by SAIC. Later, they merged into SAIC in 2007 because they were really desperate. After acquiring Rover, they later launched MG3, MG7 and other sedan products. After the products were put on the market Sales volume in the first year was only a pitiful 3,000 units. This failure also led to Nanjing Auto's lack of strength, and it could only obey the arrangement.

In addition, whether it was the upper management pushing for the merger of SAIC and Nanjing Automobile, or the main reason why SAIC took the initiative to merge with Nanjing Automobile, it was also the conflict between the two parties over Rover's intellectual property rights.

SAIC purchased the intellectual property rights for the Rover 25 and 75 models and engines for 67 million pounds, while Nanjing Automobile purchased Rover, MG, and their engine supplier Powertrain for 50 million pounds.

In the following two years, SAIC and Nanjing Automobile launched two self-owned brand products, SAIC Roewe and Nanjing MG, on the Rover platform.

These two cars come from the same source, and the two companies also emphasize their British style in their marketing. It can be said that they are tit for tat in every aspect, and the internal friction trend is obvious.

But if Barron's acquisition of the British car brands of Ford and Volkswagen Group is completed, it will no longer need those brands and technologies of Rover Motors. It can completely reach an agreement with SAIC to acquire the Rover owned by Nanjing Automobile. To transfer the company's "legacy" to the other party, all it takes is the Nanjing Automobile Group.

Therefore, in this case, the acquisition of Nanjing Automobile Group is not out of the question.

After he explained this to Li Lu, the CEO of Tianhe Capital began to contact Nanjing Automobile regarding the acquisition of Nanjing Automobile Group.

Of course, if you want to really be able to enter Jiangsu Province, that is, the controlling shareholder of Nanjing Automobile Group, you need help from Barron's side - for example, after Tianhe Capital acquired Nanjing Automobile Group, in addition to In addition to keeping the production base in Jiangsu Province and expanding its scale, it can also complete a localized joint venture project with a British luxury car brand.