| Your comment is all over the place and you are moving the goal posts quite a bit. Since we are talking about Renault specifically, I will assume that you are not French otherwise you would not have written your comment. Basically, it comes down to this, France is Renault and Renault is France. The French state has a 15% stake because it wants to influence the board, keep jobs in France and it will do that even if Renault loses money just like it did before Renault was privatized in 1996. The French state will never let Renault fail and will always be there as a backstop if push comes to shove which is to say, it is there to make sure that if Renault needs cash it will give it. In 2021, at the height of the COVID period, the French state was ready to re-nationalize Renault instead of seeing it dissapear if necessary. Then we have the countless subsidies and programs created all over the years so that French people buy newer vehicles from EU car makers. The same was done after 2008 when there was the massive cash for clunkers program to stimulate demand. All of this money is coming from the state coffers, taxes paid to subsidize the purchase of new cars which benefits Renault and Peugeot immensely since these two brands are very strong in France. So even though in practice the French state doesn't own a majority stake, it may as well because it will do anything it can to protect and help Renault keep it's market share. Furthermore, nothing at Renault gets done without the French state's approval. If the French government thinks a merger is not good, it won't happen. If Renault wants to lay off people, it will have to through the government first, the unions second and only then will it happen. As for the part of your comment regarding the profits out of China, that was not part of my response and not part of the original comment either so I am just going to ignore it. Regarding the IP theft, every car makers steals from the competition. My uncle's job at Renault was to buy cars from their competitors and take them apart bit by bit to understand everything that was under the hood and then make recommendations to his bosses about all the new tech they found so that they could build their own version of it and include it in their newer models. The point of the joint venture is moot. This is China's business model. If you want to sell cars there, you have to do it their way. It's the same exact playbook that the EU is using against the US tech companies by forcing them to comply with EU regulations if they want to keep distributing software and products here. Don't want to comply, then no one is forcing you to do it. You just won't sell anything in China and that is that. Same goes for the EU. Finally as another commenter said above, every country worth their salt on this planet is protecting to some extent their domestic champions, whether in the arms, space, car, food industry and whatever else. It's just the normal thing to do. So you can complain about China all you want, it is doing exactly what the rest of the world has done for decades, but the difference now is that the Chinese brands are no longer the laughing stock of the car market. They are leading in terms of price, quality and innovation and this reaction from the US government and the EU to apply tariffs on Chinese automakers is just a desperate attempt at stopping the flood of superior products. That in itself is ironic because since Trump was elected and then re-elected, it's been a constant thing from the EU politicians to rally against the US tariffs just so that they can turn around and implement tariffs on China themselves. When Germany sold millions of cars in China, that was just good business, when China does it in the EU, they are "dumping" their "over-production". When the US implements tariffs on EU companies and products, that is because Trump is an idiot who likes to start trade wars but when the EU does it on China, then it's simply "protecting" its industry. I am honestly sick and tired of this double-speak, do as I say not as I do type of attitude coming from the most western countries. The western companies should stop whining and try to compete with China instead of crying because China just beat them at their own game. |