General Motors targets China’s urban rich with luxury imports

BEIJING: General Motors has lost its mojo in China. Sales of its flagship Buick, Cadillac and Chevrolet brands have slumped by a third over the past five years to 1.3 million cars a year as consumers snap up smart EVs made by home-grown firms such as Xpeng, Nio and BYD.

To generate some buzz around its American brands, GM is planning to target well-heeled consumers in China’s megacities with niche, luxury imports, executives at the US automaker told Reuters.

Using a new direct sales platform called Durant Guild, the company will host invitation-only events to showcase possible products, open “experience centers” in urban hubs and potentially stage pop-ups at selected sites, they said.

“Durant Guild is not a volume play, but if we do a good job and the products sell well, it will create a lot of buzz around Cadillac and Chevy and will help how people perceive our products and technology,” the head of GM in China, Julian Blissett, told Reuters.

While he declined to name which cars would be sold through Durant Guild, he said think of US premium models currently unavailable in China such as the all-electric GMC Hummer pick-up or sports-utility vehicle (SUV), the hulking gasoline-fuelled Chevrolet Tahoe SUV or the sleek Chevrolet Corvette sports car.

Blissett, a 16-year veteran of the Chinese market, said such “halo cars” would fit nicely into communities of consumers in cities who have started to harbour an interest in performance cars for racing, or SUVs to venture off the beaten track.

“There’s a lot more appetite to take more off-road types of vehicles to explore nature, and that wasn’t a trend five, 10 years ago,” Blissett said in an interview.

Durant Guild, which is named after GM’s founder William Durant, will be wholly owned and operated by GM and will launch officially as soon as this month.

To mark the launch, GM is hosting a series of invitation-only events, with the first expected in Shanghai on Friday.

GM hopes that by using a sales and marketing model akin to ones that worked well for Tesla and Apple in China, it will be able to channel any energy and excitement the imports generate back into GM’s existing models in the country.

“That will be a positive impact on our business and will support our growth plans in China,” Blissett said.

GM plans to do this without relying on traditional brick-and-mortar dealerships. It was not immediately clear how GM plans to service cars sold through Durant Guild.

Global automakers such GM, Volkswagen and Toyota , which have dominated the combustion age in China, are falling steadily behind local players in a booming electric vehicle (EV) market.

Foreign brands including Buick and Chevrolet have dominated in China since the 1990s, typically winning a collective 60% to 70% share of passenger car sales in recent years.

In the first eight months of 2022, however, foreign brands only captured 52.4% of the market.