Sean Tupp is the national sales manager for GAC Motor NZ
The new Chinese brand set up shop here in February 2025. Back then it said Erjin (David) Bao was the new brand's national manager for New Zealand.
Tupp began his career at Ford New Zealand, then moved to the Giltrap Group-owned European Motor Distributors. There he climbed the ranks from sales manager at Volkswagen to general manager of the Skoda brand.
He also became the sales GM for Holden New Zealand before moving into management roles at MG Motor New Zealand and most recently GWM Haval Australia and New Zealand.
GAC Motor, short for Guangzhou Automobile Group Motor Co., Ltd., is a Chinese car manufacturer that was founded in 2008. It has headquarters in Guangzhou. Wholly owned by GAC Group, it focuses on making vehicles, auto parts, and is involved in related trading services.
Its first offering will likely be the Aion 5 SUV, and should launch here before year end.
As of November 2021, GAC Motor is represented in the Middle East, Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa. In addition, the company has set up distributors in several countries.
GAC Motor has partnered with major international manufacturers, such as Toyota. It is now taking steps to introduce its line-up—including electric and hybrid SUVs under the Aion banner—to markets including Australia (slated for mid-2025) and New Zealand.
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NZ Herald
29 minutes ago
- NZ Herald
Round three - United States and China hold economic talks as trade truce nears end
The Trump Administration has been trying to win concessions from many countries before an August 1 deadline for reimposing tariffs announced in April. Those levies were suspended in order to reach trade deals. Over the last week, the Trump Administration has announced deals with some of America's biggest trading partners in quick succession. Last week the US and Japan finally agreed to a deal that included a 15% tariff on Japanese imports and a pledge from Japan to invest US$550 billion in the US. Today, Trump announced that he had also reached a deal with the European Union, whose economies rely on exports to the US. The deal would put a 15% tariff on many European exports, including cars. One of the biggest unknowns is what will happen with China, which remains one of America's largest source of imports. After a tit-for-tat period of tariffs and retaliation, the two nations have come to something of an uneasy truce after talks in Geneva in May, and in London in June. Today, before he met with European officials, Trump implied that some kind of trade arrangement with China might be close at hand. 'We just struck a deal with Japan as you know, and we're very close to a deal with China,' he said. This will be the first meeting between the countries without an imminent crisis, like the tariff standoff or China's economically crippling ban on rare earth exports this year. Trade experts said the list of potential topics for discussion was long, ranging from Trump's push to get China to stop the flow of fentanyl to the US, to America's concerns about its purchases of Russian and Iranian oil, and recent exit bans that have prevented US citizens from leaving China. US officials appear to be looking forward to more ambitious trade talks in the months to come. Those could include Chinese purchases of American products, steps to open the Chinese market and, potentially, Chinese investment in the US. They are also likely seeking to lay the groundwork for a potential meeting between Trump and Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, this year. Administration officials are considering a trip to Beijing before a meeting of Asian and Pacific countries in South Korea in October or potentially connecting Trump and Xi on the sidelines of an international meeting. Michael Pillsbury, a former government official who has advised the Trump Administration on China, said this would be Trump's sixth summit meeting with Xi. Each of those summits had a minimum of two hours of dialogue, and Trump went prepared with specific dealmaking requests, he said. 'The President feels it's better to deal face to face,' he said. Trade experts are also wondering whether US technology controls or an agreement to transfer ownership of TikTok may be on the negotiating table. On CNBC last week, Howard Lutnick, the Secretary of Commerce, said that the US had submitted a proposal to China for transferring ownership of TikTok to American companies, and that the Administration was waiting for the Chinese response. The topic was 'not officially' part of the trade talks, he said, 'but unofficially, of course'. Tensions between the US and China started to spiral after Trump announced his 'Liberation Day' tariffs in early April. China was the only country to immediately retaliate, matching Trump's tariffs of 34% with 34% tariffs on American products. Beijing also set up a licensing system to restrict exports of seven rare earth elements that are processed almost exclusively in China and used in electric cars, smart bombs and other high-tech devices. Trump then responded by ratcheting up tariffs on Chinese products to a minimum of 145%, which brought much of the trade between the countries to a halt. The previous rounds of negotiations secured a temporary truce that included China's relaxing its restrictions on shipments of valuable rare earth minerals and magnets needed by US manufacturers. In return, US officials agreed to roll back limits on exports of US products and technology, including ethane and airplane parts, as well as the proposed visa restrictions. US tariffs on Chinese imports were scaled back to 30%, while China has 10% tariffs on American products. The truce is scheduled to expire on August 12, after which tariffs would rise by 10%. However, Bessent has been optimistic that the truce could be extended. In an interview on the Fox Business Network last week, Bessent said that 'trade is in a good place' with China. He added that he hoped to begin having broader discussions with his counterparts about rebalancing the Chinese economy and encouraging China to curb purchases of Russian and Iranian oil. Bessent said China was in a manufacturing slump and faced a residential real estate market crisis. He argued Beijing must focus on building a consumer economy. 'They can't export their economic problems to the rest of the world; they need to solve them,' Bessent said. US companies continue to have a rash of criticisms about doing business in China, including the country's newly established rare earth licensing system. The processing time for licences is long, American firms say, and China requests proprietary and sensitive business information as part of the applications. In a survey released this month, members of the US-China Business Council said strained relations and tariffs between the two countries remained their biggest concerns. But they also said Chinese policies favouring domestic companies were eroding confidence in doing business in the country. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Written by: Alan Rappeport and Ana Swanson ©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
NZ Herald
13 hours ago
- NZ Herald
Never mind the tariffs, NZ must prepare for the Chinese consumer rebound
Tourism has been a bigger problem. Chinese visitors to New Zealand remain well down on pre-Covid numbers, and it's not clear that this will be easy to turn around. Then, as we look forward, China will play an increasing role in driving the technology in our lives: think electric vehicles. Two leading international experts on China's economic outlook – Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Andrew Browne and ANZ China chief economist Raymond Yeung – attended Auckland's China Business Summit this month to unpick what's going on. Their conclusions offered some real hope for New Zealand businesses in the years ahead. First the bad news There's no question Chinese consumer sentiment is low and there is slowing economic growth. 'The number one issue dragging the Chinese sentiment down is the property market,' says ANZ's Yeung. 'We definitely need to see a recovery of the property market in order to see a sustainable recovery in sentiment and consumer spending because of the wealth effect.' The latest numbers show the property market is still dropping month on month, he says. A report from Goldman Sachs last month estimated prices have fallen 20% over the past four years and could decline another 10% before bottoming out in 2027. That matches ANZ's estimates. 'I believe it will be another 18 to 24 months of contraction of the property market,' Yeung says. 'That sounds bad. But that is a national strategy to turn the country from a property-led economy to a tech and renewable energy-led economy. 'There is a view from the top that China simply has to go through this transition,' he says. It's one of the features of the Chinese system that its leadership can look through often painful periods of transition and focus on bigger, longer-term goals. As Chinese Ambassador to New Zealand, Wang Xiaolong (also speaking at the summit) put it: 'No matter how turbulent the global landscape is, or will be, China remains unremittingly committed to development to deliver better lives for the Chinese people, in the historic process of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. 'There is a firm, unshakeable national consensus that has not changed and will not change.' Trade war showdown The ability to absorb more short-term economic pain is one of the big advantages China has in its current trade war showdown with the US, says Browne. 'I think it is important to know that Xi Jinping thinks he is winning! And he may not be wrong,' Browne says. 'Obviously, China has problems in its economy. We're in the third year of a real estate meltdown. Youth unemployment is high, it is crushing the dreams of an entire generation of college graduates and their families. 'Xi Jinping is enormously concerned about all of this but he is focused on a different prize,' Browne says. That prize is technology. China is laser-focused on developing a high-tech manufacturing industry to enable China to escape the American choke hold, he says. '[Xi] sees what he says are changes 'unseen in a century' ... meaning the rise of China and relative decline of the USA. 'This, from Xi's perspective, is China's moment to seize.' When it comes to tariffs and the trade war, both Yeung and Browne see China having the upper hand. Yeung believes it's likely the present US/China tariffs (currently sitting at 30%) will fade into insignificance in the coming years. ANZ China chief economist Raymond Yeung. 'I expect this tariff will be gone very soon,' he says. 'There is too much stakeholder interest.' Basically, the US needs China's rare earth metals, and China needs access to US semiconductor chip technology. Vietnam is the most highly vulnerable to US tariffs, with 8.3% of its GDP exposed to the US, Yeung says. 'For China it is just 3%. They can give it up, just let it go.' He notes that China is also currently suffering from deflation – something that helps mitigate any inflationary impact from tariffs. Browne isn't so convinced Trump will back down further on tariffs. However, he does believe the US got outplayed by China in the showdown earlier this year. 'Nobody knows how this is going to play out. We haven't seen this since the 1930s. So I still wouldn't rule out an inflationary surge.' We can't even exclude the 'possibility that Trump isn't stark raving mad', he says. We may see some positive outcomes emerge from the tariff policies. 'We've already seen a few. It has galvanised Germany, and it has galvanised Europe. It is possible Europe might get its act together and launch a unified capital market and start issuing bonds, and compete with the US and China. 'It's equally possible that the US could convince China to shift its economic model further to consumption.' Or, it could all end up relatively benign for the US economy. Trump might continue to reduce tariffs, and a combination with 'cutting taxes, slimming the government and cutting red tape may usher in a golden era for the US ... we don't know.' Another possible outcome is that the world economy 'bifurcates' around the US and China, and countries like New Zealand are caught in the middle, he warns. But regardless of what happens next, Trump has made the fundamental cardinal mistake in his second term of underestimating China, Browne says. '[Former US President Joe] Biden, whether you like him or not, had the measure of China, so when he wanted to put export controls on chip-making materials, his team worked very hard with governments in the Netherlands and Japan. 'At one point in the Biden administration, he decided to get rid of all of the cranes in all of the ports in the US because there were fears they'd be counting things like military equipment going in and out. 'Unfortunately for the US they don't make cranes anymore. The Japanese do so he put in place a technology transfer agreement with Japan. Biden understood the challenge.' The US is the world's financial superpower but China is the world's manufacturing superpower, Browne says. 'It now has an industrial base that is equal to the US, plus Germany, plus Japan, plus South Korea, and then some.' That gives China a critical advantage in all the technologies that are coming of age at the same time. That came to the fore during the recent trade negotiations, where Browne says US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant also underestimated China. 'He said, 'When China exports five times as much to the US as we export to them, we have all the cards'. 'He said the Chinese were 'playing with a pair of twos ... It turned out that when he turned the cards over that China had a couple of aces.' One of those aces was rare earths. 'China threatened to choke off the supply of rare earths to the US and in doing so would have closed down vast swathes of the manufacturing industry, the defence industry, the entire car industry.' The US attempted to retaliate, denying China exports for jet engines and threatening to close down China's civilian airline project. The tariff war morphed into a supply chain war that was far more serious, Browne says. 'It turns out the Chinese had played the US, and they completely caved. 'Trump brought the tariffs down from 145% to 30%. Still high but no longer prohibitive. That's where we are now. We have a truce.' Browne says he doesn't see Trump completely abandoning tariffs. 'We were warned about recession and inflation and we haven't seen that yet,' he says. 'Tariffs are raking record amounts of revenue for the US Government. In Trump's mind, this is a substitute for taxation.' It may be that the lack of negative consequences actually emboldens Trump. 'I would not count out that possibility, that he really does come through with the big tariffs he's promised on August 1.' Tech wars Technology is at the heart of US-China competition now, Browne says. 'A lot of people got the socialist market economy wrong,' he says. 'There was this idea that it would collapse under its own contradictions and an enormous amount of waste. 'And look, the waste in the Chinese system is spectacular but it is also spectacularly well co-ordinated.' It's a whole-of-nation approach, he says. 'Private/public partnerships, centralised R&D, centralised marketing and bottomless supplies of capital and this incredible winnowing process through dog-eat-dog capitalism in the marketplace. What emerges are these apex predators.' There's the rapid rise of car manufacturers like BYD and the big advances China is making in battery technology. But even in the media space, in the most highly censored economy in the world, China produced TikTok, which now has greater insight into the minds of young Americans than Meta, he says. 'They have a system for producing world-beating companies in sector after sector.' Tariffs are mostly a bad thing, Browne says. If they are well-targeted, however, they can sometimes do some good by protecting the industries that a country seeks to develop. 'The Biden administration identified semiconductors, clean tech, batteries and so on,' he says. 'When I talked to investors and asked, 'what are you interested in?' number one was the US. They were attracted by all of the money going into these sectors.' All of that is now being dismantled. 'The big beautiful tax bill doesn't just eliminate the subsidies and incentives in these areas, it actually penalises companies operating in these areas,' Browne says. The US is essentially handing the entire landscape over to China, he says. 'If you want to do your green transition now, whether you're in Africa or Latin America, you want Chinese technologies. And the United States will never catch up.' Can the US and China be friends? Browne says he's very sceptical that there is such a thing as a US-China grand bargain. 'I think the relationship is defined by a core tension. At a high level, there is an almost complete absence of trust,' he says. The idea China is a threat and must be treated as competition is one of the few areas of bipartisan political consensus in the US, he says. 'But these two economies are deeply enmeshed; they are joined at the hip. It creates all kinds of mind-bending paradoxes. 'The Chinese hypersonic Carrier Killer missile cannot find its target without high-end chips manufactured by TSMC in Taiwan, using US tech,' Browne says. 'By the same token, the American Patriot missile cannot defend against Chinese rockets without magnets that come from Chinese rare earth materials.' This is a relationship that is best described as 'weaponised interdependency', he says. Never mind the tariffs ... Yeung and Browne agree on a lot. But Browne still sees China as an exporting nation – as evidenced by its US$114 billion ($188.3b) trade surplus with the world. Yeung believes focusing on this can lead to a misunderstanding of what's really driving China's economic policy. He sees China as an importing nation, based on the fact 88% of its total GDP is domestic now. 'It's domestic growth that will drive China's development,' he says. Here in New Zealand we shouldn't pay too much attention to whether China hits 5.3% GDP or 5.1%, he says. 'If China is going to transition, it's not about how many percentage points of GDP, it is about the changes in lifestyle, the quality of life.' In order for New Zealand to make the most of the Chinese market we need to speed up our ability to adapt, he says. 'You really need to think about the Chinese speed. Maybe we talk about annual planning but even within one year the Chinese business cycle changes a lot.' New Zealand needs to be ready and to position itself for when Chinese consumer confidence eventually rebounds, he says. 'This tariff issue is not the core issue. 'I don't need to reiterate, this is a US$18 trillion economy. There is also US$36 trillion in household deposits sitting in bank accounts in China, ready to unlock and unleash. 'Once consumer sentiment comes back, that will be a massive wave of consumption power waiting for you guys to tap. 'Consumption is the future of China, supported by technological change. And China is going through this with or without the US.' Liam Dann is business editor-at-large for the New Zealand Herald. He is a senior writer and columnist, and also presents and produces videos and podcasts. He joined the Heraldin 2003.
NZ Herald
2 days ago
- NZ Herald
South Island surges ahead as regional economic divide deepens
'Interest rates have come down, which is starting to ease pressure, but many households and businesses are still doing it tough.' Kiwibank General Manager Troy Sutherland said 'The further south you go the better the business climate seems… That pretty much sums up our latest look into the regions.' Southland retained its top spot, buoyed by sustained construction and a regional building boom. Otago, meanwhile, leapt to a score of 5 thanks to a sharp rebound in international tourism and an 8% increase in employment - the strongest growth in the country. 'Our friends from across the ditch are lacing up their boots and hitting the ski fields,' said Sutherland. 'The few Americans that have a map beyond the USA are exploring the edge of the Earth. And Chinese visitor arrivals are finally recovering.' Economic activity has improved across most of the country, with the average score lifted from 3/10 to 4. Image / Kiwibank Canterbury's economy remains steady at 4 out of 10, with post-earthquake infrastructure works and a relatively strong housing market driving momentum. House prices there are up 1.5% year-on-year, compared to the national average decline of 0.3%. Despite strong commodity prices and a weak New Zealand dollar boosting rural incomes, Kiwibank notes many farmers remain cautious. 'Like many other households and businesses, crawling out of a recession means rebuilding equity. That's step one,' Sutherland said. 'Once balance sheets are in better shape, there's reason to spend. And once demand in the economy strengthens, there's reason to invest. We're not quite there yet.' The story in the North Island is less rosy. The average economic score across Te Ika-a-Māui is stuck at 3.2, with a wide range of performance. Taranaki, Northland and Gisborne all saw their scores decline, with Taranaki posting the country's largest drop in employment at -8%. 'Regions like Taranaki, Northland and Gisborne are going backwards,' said Kerr. 'These regions are grappling with falling employment, softer housing markets and softer activity across the board.' Otago and Southland are New Zealand's economic bright spots. Photo / Mark Mitchell Gisborne saw the weakest housing activity, recording no growth in house sales in the three months to May. Northland experienced a double-digit drop in new dwelling consents and scored just 2.6 out of 10, making it one of the worst-performing regions in the country. Not all is bleak in the north. Manawatū-Whanganui was crowned 'Most Improved,' with strong employment growth and infrastructure investment lifting its score nearly two points. Auckland rose to 4, buoyed by continued population growth, and Wellington improved modestly from 2 to 3, though employment and housing remain soft. 'Retail sales remain subdued,' said Kerr. 'Wellington recorded the steepest annual decline at -3.3%, but some regions like Waikato and the Bay of Plenty showed signs of improvement.' Even in cities where the numbers improved, underlying challenges persist. Wellington's score may have risen, but its unrounded score is just 2.7, and house prices in the capital have fallen more than anywhere else in the country. With interest rates falling and a wave of mortgage refixing expected, Kiwibank economists are hopeful this will free up household budgets and spur an eventual broader economic rebound. 'There's a Nazaré-type wave of mortgage refixing due,' said Sutherland. 'The move onto lower rates should help improve household disposable incomes, boosting consumption, supporting the housing market and wider business activity. But we may have to wait until summer for things to heat up.'
