Talking seven seats and supply chains with MG
We were chatting with MG Motor Philippines President Felix Jiang recently while on a drive for their G50 Plus. We started on the car and ended on their supply chain.
The car is a three-row people carrier, nicely specced and with a choice of seven or eight seater. Seven means captain’s chairs on the second row while eight means a bench. Buyer’s choice, same price. And that price is meant to bring something to the market that kind of overdelivers in that very competitive segment. More clearly, what they want to do is deliver all the good stuff from the size segment but at the costs of a class smaller. A rather bold move.
There is a lot of bold in MG right now. Or rather, they have given themselves some pretty high goals. They aim to move up the Philippine automotive market ladder relatively quickly, and they spoke to us about how they would be trying to do that.
So they talked about the unsexy stuff. They talked about logistics.
They cannot grow or indeed even survive without paying a huge amount of attention to the customer and what is importantly for them. And besides the flashy cars like the sportscar Cyberster or the hot hatch electric MG 4, they want to bring people the vehicles and the vehicle experiences that just make sense and answer their needs. Such as the MG 3 Hybrid and the MG G50 Plus.
So they have to pay attention to the whole process of taking care of the customer, and for this they are drawing on some serious big corporate strengths. Because they can draw from the productions and logistics systems of the mother company that is SAIC, they have set up programs where there are regularly scheduled sea shipments every week. In addition to this, they commit to being able to ship suddenly-needed parts by air if that is what has to be done. This is often said by many companies, but what is different is this. MG can order a car and have it arrive with a lead time of around two weeks.
All we have just spoken about is kind of the just-in-case stuff, if they have to do things that aren’t planned. In terms of car movement, they already have projections and often the cars are sitting in warehouses just waiting to be loaded onto the transport ships which, by the way, SAIC also owns. But in general, everything should be planned out.
This pre-planning also applies to after-sales programs, as well. The team has been given the marching orders to have even the most unexpected parts held in stock locally. This includes individual parts and modules but also includes whole engines for some of the more popular models.
In many ways we avoid talking about cars and calling them “China cars” and that is often because you cannot lump all the cars together as one type or generalization. They are not. But in this case, we will because we use this as a way to explain how all the plans of MG can be done. The strengths that these companies can bring to bear is in their supply chains and their depth of production ability. It is simply quicker and easier to get things done in that environment. Needs can be answered, changes can be made.
What MG Philippines wants to do is understand the deeper needs of their market, and then use the power of the large production and supply chains within their group to answer those needs. This presents some almost unprecedented opportunities for the automotive world, and some hopefully improved faith from the consumers themselves.
