General Motors’ Asia-Pacific Saga
Did you know that General Motors once sold more cars and trucks in Japan than any other automaker?
Most people don’t realize it, but General Motors was the dominant player in the entire Asia-Pacific region up until World War II. Vehicle assembly operations were established in Japan in 1926; China in 1927; and India in 1928. GM also entered Australia in 1926 and established Holden’s (now Holden) in Australia 1931.
With this broad base, GM was a major player in the region right up until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 1941, December 7. GM was actually number one in the Japanese market from the 1920s through the 1930s and had a larger share of the market there than in the U.S.
After World War II, however, GM was forced out of all major Asia-Pacific markets except Australia. In Japan, laws written with the guidance of the American General Douglas MacArthur prohibited U.S. automakers from re-entering the market. In China, the market was completely shut off. And in India, operations were nationalized in 1954.
Partly because it proved so difficult to re-enter these markets, the company’s primary focus remained on North America and Europe for many years. Even when the first real opportunities in China opened up in the late 1980s, there was a lot of skepticism because of the risk.
Yet the potential was there, and it warranted the risk. Since the early 1990s, GM has expanded throughout the region on an unprecedented scale and pace.
A series of successful joint ventures in China have made that country GM’s second-largest market, after the U.S. In fact, last year GM became the first global company to sell more than a million vehicles in China in a single year.
In Korea, GM Daewoo is now producing nearly 2 million vehicles a year — most of them for export. GM-India now has a new design center and its manufacturing complex is now four times the size it was when GM resumed operations there in the early Nineties.
And the potential for even more growth throughout the region is tremendous. Between 2008 and 2017, six of the world’s top ten automotive growth markets are projected in the Asia-Pacific region. They are China, India, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, and Thailand.
As retired CEO Smith, John F., Jr.Jack Smith recently told the GM Asia-Pacific team’s leadership, “The Asia-Pacific region has been a great success story for General Motors, but the road hasn’t always been that smooth and the journey promises even more surprises and hurdles. In this business, Asia-Pacific is not a region for the faint-of-heart, but if you’re willing to take the risks, deal with surprises, and stay the course, it’s a region with tremendous payoff.”
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