Volvo Car Corp’s new chief executive said he planned to push the Swedish brand’s vehicles upmarket and make China its biggest market within five years.
While Germany’s luxury brands are reporting rising sales and deriving a large portion of their profits from China, Volvo sold just 22,000 cars last year in the world’s largest vehicle market and aims to sell about 30,000 there in 2010.
Volvo plans to bolster its position with the help of Geely, the Chinese carmaker whose parent company completed its purchase of Volvo from Ford Motor for $1.5bn earlier this month. “We are latecomers,” Stefan Jacoby, the carmaker’s chief executive, told the Financial Times. “In five years it [China] might be the strongest market globally.”