Infiniti to Target Young Chinese Buyers Who Find BMW Commonplace

November 15, 2013 Leave a comment

Infiniti to Target Young Chinese Buyers Who Find BMW Commonplace

Nissan Motor Co. (7201)’s luxury Infiniti brand plans to attract younger Chinese buyers who are more open-minded about trying out new cars because they find an Audi, Mercedes or BMW too commonplace. Luxury buyers in China, the world’s largest auto market, are younger than the average owner of premium cars globally and are less concerned about a brand’s heritage than its present-day image, Johan de Nysschen, president of Infiniti, said in an interview in Hong Kong.“Ironically, these three German brands have become so successful that they’ve become almost a little bit ubiquitous,” de Nysschen, who formerly headed Audi’s U.S. operations, said in an interview with Zeb Eckert on Bloomberg Television’s “Asia Business.” “They’re everywhere. And this is where we see a big opportunity with this new emerging premium consumer, to offer them an alternative, reinvent the notion of exclusivity.”

Infiniti is targeting 10 percent of the world premium market by 2020. To do that, the marque has to win market share from Volkswagen AG’s Audi, Bayerische Motoren Werke AG and Daimler AG’s Mercedes-Benz in China, which McKinsey & Co. predicts will overtake the U.S. to become the top market for luxury vehicles by 2016.

The three German automakers, which all build cars in China, account for about three of every four premium cars sold in the Asian nation, LMC data show. China levies a 25 percent duty on imported cars, making them less competitive against locally produced models.

Infiniti expects to begin local production of two long-wheelbase models, the Q50 sedan and QX50 crossover, next year. Automakers offer stretched versions of their models for China, as consumers there prefer to be chauffeured and seek more backseat comfort.

“Infiniti will be a boutique brand,” de Nysschen said. “Rather than try to park an Infiniti in every driveway, we would like to park them in the right driveways and present the product and the brand that will appeal to those people who want something different.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Ma Jie in Tokyo at jma124@bloomberg.net

Filed under Macro Trends

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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