China's auto market has seen a continuous slide since March this year and some people say that auto sales in the Chinese market have entered a "premature winter." What has pushed the previously hot auto market into the icy water?
The late January snowstorms in southern China and the May 12 earthquake in Sichuan province were regional and temporary, and their impact on the auto market has been very limited. It is the economic situation that really affects the auto market most. The same is true of the stock market slump. But the economic depression is not a totally bad thing for the auto market.

At first, from a global perspective, we see that the developed European and American countries are the biggest markets for auto sales as well as the centers of auto development and production. Although the Chinese auto market has rapidly grown in recent years and China has become the world's second largest car market after the United States, the global auto-making giants only see Chinese market as their profit-making workshop, not as the core of market value.

The current depression of world economy triggered by the U.S. credit crisis has dented the world's major auto markets, but in comparison, Chinese economy is not influenced so much by the global economic depression. While the European, American and Japanese markets have seen the negative growth, China's GDP and auto sales have continued to grow up, though the growth rate has started to slow down.

The U.S. credit crisis has heavily impacted the previous patterns of global production and consumption. The rising Chinese consumer power will make the world's auto giants look to China as the global market center. New vehicle models, new car-making technologies and high-quality service will flood to China. The days will be gone when only few classic models and several old-fashioned engines prevailed in the Chinese auto-making industry. The expanding new rich in China will become the target consumers of the global auto giants.  

On the other hand, from the perspective of the domestic market, we can say that China's auto market has seen the biggest growth in the past five or six years. The car ownership of consumers and the production capacity of carmakers both have moved into the world's leading ranks. But the current auto market in China is still immature, with many growing pains covered under its fast growth.

The cooling-off period now is a good opportunity for auto market adjustment, which will entail lots of sharp pains anyway. The re-ordering of the market, reshuffling of the brands and dealers, and upgrading of the service quality will become the only approach to the future competitive market.

The direct beneficiaries of the market adjustment will be the consumers, but the car makers and dealers as well in the long run. All of them will benefit from the resultant virtuous circle of auto market growth.