Reorganization of the Global Automobile Industry and Structural Change of the Automobile Component Industry

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: The world automobile industry is witnessing an unprecedented scale of change in the 1990?s. The end of Cold War structure, the rapid spread of the information revolution and the international economic globalization. The wave of globalization has directly affected the international automobile industry and has accelerated the global reorganization of it. First, the impact of globalization emerged in the financial and securities industries, which experienced the Big Bang in the 1980?s. Then it spread to the fast growing information and communication?s industries. Now the automobile industry is no exception. The automobile industry was, especially in advanced countries, primarily a national industry, no matter how internationalized its business content developed. It has been a representation of a nation?s manufacturing industry serving the best interests of the nation. Take trade disputes concerning automobiles for instance. It has been discussed as being related to the arguments of what should be the correct way to handle automobile trade, the balance of trade, and the job security for a countries labor force. The automobile industry also has a wide range of related industries such as the component or material industries, on which it has had a great impact at an entire national level. In this sense, the industry was the national industry. Because of this background, automobile manufacturers in advanced nations constructed their management strategies that centered on their own country. And their overseas strategies tightly connected to the domestic strategies and had a strong tendency to compliment them, no matter how heavily they depended on their overseas business and exports. Therefore car manufacturers? competitiveness was closely related to how superior their competitiveness is in their domestic markets.