Thread: Three Chinese car makers posted strong earnings

AUGUST 25, 2010, 11:57 A.M. ET.

Three Chinese car makers posted strong earnings

Three Chinese car makers posted strong earnings growth Wednesday, powered by Beijing's measures to boost car sales.

The government-stimulus measures, designed to encourage auto purchases during the global economic downturn, helped China overtake the U.S. as the world's biggest auto market in 2009.

But while car-sales growth in China was fast at the start of 2010, it has moderated in recent months partly because of a reduction in government incentives.

SAIC Motor Corp., China's largest car maker by sales volume, said its first-half net profit more than quadrupled from a year earlier.

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AUGUST 24, 2010.

China Traffic Jam Could Last Weeks

By SHAI OSTER

BEIJING—A 60-mile traffic jam near the Chinese capital could last until mid-September, officials say.

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Associated Press

Traffic has been snarled along the outskirts of Beijing and is stretching toward the border of Inner Mongolia ever since roadwork on the Beijing-Tibet Highway started Aug. 13. The following week, parts of a major road circling Beijing were closed, further tightening overburdened roadways.

As the jam on the highway, also known as National Highway 110, passed the 10-day mark Tuesday, local authorities dispatched hundreds of police to keep order and to reroute cars and trucks carrying

China Slow to Promote Benefits of Rail Freight. Access thousands of business sources not available on the free web. Learn More.Villagers along Highway 110 took advantage of the jam, selling drivers packets of instant noodles from roadside stands and, when traffic was at a standstill, moving between trucks and cars to hawk their wares.

Truck drivers, when they weren't complaining about the vendors overcharging for the food, kept busy playing card games. Their trucks, for the most part, are basic, blue-colored vehicles with no features added to help pamper drivers through long hauls.

Truck driver Long Jie said his usual trip from the coal boomtown of Baotou in Inner Mongolia to Beijing, which normally takes three days, was now taking him a week or more. The delay, he said, meant he would have to raise his rates above the usual 12,000 yuan, about $1,765, for a 30-ton truck full of cargo.


.Sounding frazzled and tired, Mr. Long, a driver for Baotou Zengcai Shipping Co., said in a telephone interview that the traffic got a little better once he finally made it off the highway.

Though triggered by construction, the root cause for the congestion is chronic overcrowding on key national arteries. Automobile sales in China whizzed past the U.S. for the first time last year, as Chinese bought 13.6 million vehicles, compared with 9.4 million vehicles in 2008. China is racing to build new roads to ease the congestion, but that very construction is making traffic problems worse—at least temporarily.

China's roads suffer from extra wear and tear from illegally overloaded trucks, especially along key coal routes. Coal supplies move from Mongolia through the outskirts of the capital on their way to factories. There are few rail lines to handle the extra load. Though the current massive gridlock is unusual, thousands of trucks line up along the main thoroughfares into Beijing even on the best days.

Beijing is particularly prone to traffic jams because it is a bottleneck point. Drivers from the northwest have to navigate its rings of concentric circular highways to get to coastal ports or to head south. The sixth-ring road is the biggest, and until a new beltway is finished in the next few years, there is no alternative route around the capital.

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.Also entering the mix is the swell of passenger cars into the city from residents who have had to move farther from the capital to find affordable homes.

Other cities around the world face similar congestion headaches. The worst are in developing countries where the sudden rise of a car-buying middle class outpaces highway construction—unlike in the U.S., which had decades to develop transportation infrastructure to keep up with auto buyers.

A recent study by IBM suggested some of the worst commutes are in Moscow, where drivers reported 2½-hour delays, on average, when asked about the worst traffic jam they faced in three years. Still, Beijing beat out Mexico City, Johannesburg, Moscow and New Delhi to take top spot in the International Business Machines Corp. survey of "commuter pain," which is based on a measure of the economic and emotional toll of commuting.

The mega-jam on the city outskirts comes as officials warn that downtown traffic in Beijing is steadily worsening. State media on Tuesday reported that average driving speeds in the capital could drop below nine miles an hour if residents keep buying at current rates of 2,000 new cars a day.

Journal Communitydiscuss..“ Welcome to the First World, China! It's where you pay first world taxes, lose your job to third world people and sit in all the world's traffic.
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