Dagens Industri has – I believe – put two and two together and come up with five.
2 – The Koenigsegg Group has attracted a new investor and no longer seeks extra funding from the Swedish government.
2 – Christian von Koenigsegg does an interview with Auto Motor and Sport, stating that they may seek a partnership to produce cars in China for the the Chinese market.
5 – The logical conclusion is that the partner may be Chinese and seeing as how GM have an existing partnership with Shanghai Automotive (SAIC), there are few obstacles to this being the new partner.
The Googletrans:
…..one or more foreign automakers have become a partner in the project. Now the talk is more and more that this carmaker is Chinese.
DI writes that it is likely they are SAIC, Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation. This is a company that Saab’s current owners of GM has been working with and therefore do not have to worry about with regard to technology transfer, according to DI.
It’s a very solid conclusion to draw. GM dismissed Beijing Automotive’s bid for Opel and some of the grounds cited for that rejection were fearing the loss of information to a competitor in China.
The Shanghai option does nullify those concerns due to SAIC’s existing joint-venture relationship with GM. However, I don’t believe they’re correct.
I can’t tell you why, but I’ve been tracking some information about this new investor for around a week. Remember the “Enter the Dragon” snippets post last week? That title was used for a reason.
I will not divulge the information, but I can tell you that I believe it to be quite solid, and I can also tell you that it doesn’t involve SAIC.
Think about it for a moment – SAIC were not a bidder for Saab through the sale process. They weren’t looking to get into Saab. The people looking for an investor here are not GM, it is the Koenigsegg Group. If you were them, would you approach someone who wasn’t interested in Saab, or someone who was interested?
DI.se have made a very solid and well educated guess here. It’s quite possibly the guess I would have made, too, if I were doing that from scratch. But I’m not.
I believe that an announcement should probably be made prior to the Frankfurt show. Saab and Koenigsegg will want that show to be all about the 9-5. Hopefully they’ll spill the beans prior to that.
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