China is not just Jaguar’s biggest market, it’s also the world’s biggest auto market. That’s why Jaguar is jumping to China. And starting in 2014, you might see this famous icon more and more on cars made just for China’s domestic market. Now the price tag for this deal is $1.75bn. This is for a joint venture with China’s Chery automobile group which it says its China’s largest auto exporter. And this deal will be based right outside of this city right here, Shanghai which is of course China’s financial capital, a new car factory’s going to be built along with a new research & development facility as well as a new engine plant.

Now in a joint press release Jaguar and Chery both hailed the deal as a milestone but online as you might imagine people are not all that happy. For example, one person named Tim Cliffe said this: Jaguar, Land Roverr too,manufacture in China? notorious for poor quality. Why do that 2 ‘best performing’ marque? Bang goes my Defender which is a type of Landrover. Someone else said a little bit cheeky here, just ask this: To be rebranded Tiger and Land Panda? And someone else as this: Truth be told, how much jobs would the UK lose for Jaguar LandRover moving operations to China? Definitely some harsh tag on unemployment. Now Jaguar has said it is not exporting jobs to China but that is clearly a fear when you hear about a company setting up new operations in China known for its cheap labor.

And China, it isn't known just for that but overall also of course thought a growing wealth and clearly that’s why Jaguar is making the jump to Asia to tap that market there. Now a year to date its China sales have already jumped by this much 78%; another luxury brand BMW coming at 35%; year to date Mercedes still clocking at a fairly respectable 8% growth there. So definitely Chinese consumers are buying more cars.

And take a look at this, and you’ll get an idea of that, this is traffic in China during one of the country’s long holidays known as Golden Week. And interestingly that China Daily reports there’re 114 million vehicles in China but as a percentage of the population 1.3 billion that’s actually quite a small number. We’ll look at less than one car for every 10 people. But in the US, there’re about 8 cars for 10 people. So the takeaway, the US car market is pretty saturated but China, well it has a lot of room for car sales to grow even if there’s not enough room on China’s roads as you saw.