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THE NATION reports: The third master plan for the Thai automobile sector has been drawn up, alongside a study of long-term development of the industry with a view to establishing the Kingdom as one of the world's key manufacturing hubs by increasing production from 2.3 million units this year to 5.6 million units by 2050. The Thailand Automotive Institute's five-year master plan for 2012-2016 is focused on increasing output by an average of 10 per cent annually. The plan is also aimed at making the country one of the top 10 auto-manufacturing nations within the same time scale and increasing the use of local content in the industry from 40 per cent now to 50 per cent. In addition, the institute's long-term development goal is to increase production step by step over the next several decades. Targeted output is 3.3 million units in 2020, rising to 4.5 million units by 2030, 5 million units by 2040, and 5.6 million units in 2050. Witoon Simachokedee, permanent secretary of th...

Moving to tap markets in Southeast Asia, China's largest automaker SAIC Motor Corp recently agreed to form a joint venture with Charoen Pokphand Group to produce its MG cars in Thailand. The Shanghai-listed automaker said in a statement last week that it will have a 51 percent stake in the planned joint venture, and CP Group, the biggest conglomerate in Thailand, will hold the remaining 49 percent. With initial investment of 1.8 billion yuan ($290 million), the joint venture is set to start production in 2014. It will have an annual production capacity of 50,000 vehicles at the outset, which could increase to 200,000. It is the first SAIC joint venture with a foreign partner to produce its own brand passenger vehicles overseas, part of the company's efforts to greatly boost its foreign deliveries to 800,000 vehicles a year by 2015. SAIC said that it also plans to export the Thailand-made MG to other Southeast Asian markets and some countries elsewhere that use right-hand-drive ...

Doc Iain Corness reports in Pattaya Mail on our last AFG Meeting with Dr. Moser: The November meeting for the Automotive Focus Group (AFG) saw an invitation extended to a Professor from the Swiss University of St Gallen, Dr. Roger Moser. The University of St. Gallen is one of the foremost business universities in Europe and on a par-level with the very best institutions around the world and through Dr. Moser has conducted studies for the Chinese and Indian auto markets. In China his research was done for business development for BMW, while the Indian study was for the aerospace consortium EADS. Dr. Moser is currently conducting a study into our automotive future, called Thailand Automotive 2022.  At the meeting he shared the first trends and some interesting information about the methodology of this study. Read the full article here Download Dr Mosers presentation here