Build Your Dream, China Style

14 Jan 2009 by Paul Rutherford

Sit looking at a blank blogging screen for long enough, and eventually the most unlikely memories arise as you search for an opening sentence. It’s just happened again, which explains why this piece doesn’t start in Schenzen, but on a train in a story by David Nobbs.

“Cupid’s Dart” was a TV film that Nobbs wrote in 1981 for Thames TV ‘Plays for Pleasure’ (he’s since adapted it as a novel, which he published a couple of years ago). The details are a little sketchy, but one scene – and one line in particular – are still vivid.

Philosopher Robin Bailey (Uncle Mort in ‘I Didn’t Know You Cared‘), is sitting on a train opposite a very young, punkish Lesley Ash. As conversation ensues, Ash reveals that she is a ‘darts groupie’. Bailey ruminates for a moment, chewing his pipe as only Bailey could do, then says a line that has become an integral part of my conversational toolkit:

“There are worlds of which we know nothing.”

You must have these moments; the moments when someone gives you a name or refers to a company that is a significant force in the world, that you are supposed to know about, and you have no knowledge of it whatsoever.

(Again, in the early 80s’ I was lodging in the house of a wonderful old New Zealand lady called Margaret. In the summer, we’d sit out drinking tea under her buddleia, and I’d try to inform her of the events of the day. I remember one evening, mid-conversation, she screwed up her eyes and nose and with Kiwi musical intonation asked:”Who’s Mich-ael Jack-son?” There are worlds of which we no nothing.)

Here’s an example: the company is called Magna. Ring any bells? It came up n conversation with a major Client a few years ago. They had just signed a partnering deal which would provide significant revenues for both parties in the coming years. “Who are they?” I said.

Tumbleweed rolled under my chair as the meeting observed two minutes silence to mourn the passing of my career.

The most patient person in the room explained: Magna is the most diversified automotive supplier in the world. It designs, develops and manufactures auto systems, assemblies, modules and components. It’s output includes bodies and chassis, powertrain systems, vision systems, exteriors, interiors, roofs, electronics, doors, tailgates; its customers include Alfa Romeo, Bentley, BMW, Chrysler, Chevrolet, Citroen…you get the point.

It virtually builds every car on the road. It’s a $27bn corporation employing 77,000 people at 242 production plants and 86 engineering / R&D centres in 25 countries.

I’d never heard of it.

This is not a complaint nor a plea from my defence team. Quite the reverse: I find it wonderful that such things can happen; that no matter how complete a picture you think you have of the world, the are vast continents that are uncharted.

So imagine my delight in stumbling across BYD.

BYD started life in 1995 as a battery company, then diversified into LCD, plastic casings, mental components, camera lenses and keypads. Indeed, it is now the Magna of the mobile phone business.

More recently – and for the purposes of this piece, with beautiful symmetry – six years ago it branched out  into motor manufacturing. In January 2008 at the Detroit Motor Show BYD launched the F6DM, a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle. Two months later, it launched the second model, the F3DM, at the Geneva Motor Show.

It has stolen a march on ‘Big Auto’ and will start selling in 2010.

BYD is, of course, Chinese. It has 7 factories, employs 130,000 people (including 10,000 researchers), and is aiming to be the world’s Number 1 car company by 2025. Like the Koreans before them, and the Japanese before that, BYD is re-writing the rulebook.

I don’t know whether to be unimaginably excited by the scale of change that China is and will continue to bring to the world, or unspeakably terrified. I just count my blessings that I don’t work in the motor industry.

For while BYD says that its name can mean ‘Build Your Dream’, for Detroit – dependent on government bailouts – the nightmare is just beginning.