“Competition should stimulate us, but not scare us,” said Mr. Scholz, during his opening speech at the Munich Motor Show (IAA) which runs until the end of the week.
A host of Chinese car manufacturers are the stars of this event where they overshadow the German manufacturers. Having already supplanted Volkswagen, Mercedes and BMW in the electric engine segment in China, they now aim to do the same on the European market.
These new players “offer attractive offers at competitive prices”, acknowledged Mr. Scholz, however convinced that “fair competition stimulates business and stimulates innovation”.
“In the 1980s, it was said that Japanese cars were going to invade all other markets; twenty years later, it was cars ‘made in Korea’; today, it is said to be Chinese electric cars,” he said. put the German chancellor into perspective.
However, “the international competitiveness of Germany, the country of the automobile, is beyond doubt,” he assured.
“I hardly know of any other site in the world which, in such a small space, has such know-how in automobile manufacturing, such a density of suppliers and SME leaders on the world market, and as much applied research in the field of automobiles as Germany”, he insisted.
Mr. Scholz was responding in particular to the Federation of German Automobile Manufacturers (VDA), whose president had previously warned about the lack of competitiveness, investment and the cumbersome European bureaucracy.
For his visit to the aisles of the show, Olaf Scholz favored the stands of German manufacturers, such as BMW, Mercedes, Volkswagen, Bosch, Continental or ZF, without stopping at the Chinese manufacturers.
He also boarded a car from the American manufacturer Tesla and visited Samsung as well as the Chinese battery manufacturer CATL, which opened its first European factory in central Germany this year.
This article is originally published on lecourrier.vn
