ASEAN: Developing a Division of Labour in a Developing Region

Asia has been widely identified by analysts as a prospective growth region for the automobile industry in the twenty-first century. Given its huge population (1.4 billion in China, 0.8 billion in India and 0.5 billion in ASEAN countries), the region has the potential to be the world’s largest automobile market. In 1995, the market of the 12 most important Asian countries (excluding Korea and Japan) totalled around three and a half million cars. The automobile markets of the developed countries of the United States, Europe and Japan had reached maturity with little further growth potential, whilst the Asian region was expected to grow to more than nine million car sales by the year 2000. The four largest ASEAN markets (Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines) represented approximately one-third of this market and were expected to grow by 50 per cent in the second half of the 1990s. China, India and South Korea represented the remainder of the Asia region (excluding Japan), but they had all developed ‘go-it-alone’ strategies (see Chapter 1 and Part IV of this volume). The ASEAN region had been more open to foreign entry.