Just curious, would you buy from volvo and say it’s buying from europe? Volvo is own by a chinese company, but the design is in sweden.
I wont buy American, China is fine. I’ll aim for EU, but China is brining solid prices and products.
Volvo already has electric car factories in Europe(and in the US), ie in Belgium. It is only Polestars(and some early electric Volvos) which are made in China.
So far the chinese owners are pretty hands off. They have provided unprecedented capital and electric car platform technology to Volvo. In exchange they got access to all Volvo knowhow about car interior design and safety(and profit from car sales).
No I count who owns and profits from the company, not where it originally started before being sold.
It sucks that buying successful businesses and ruining them is par for the course for capitalism but here we are.
Edit: to be fair I have no issue with Chinese EVs or Volvo, but I wouldnt count it as a European car maker anymore.
That’s interesting because there are a lot of European companies with huge foreign investors (Spotify I think falls under this) where a giant share of the profits are going to foreign oligarchs and hedgefunds.
But then companies like Nothing (phones) who literally only have a sales office and are registered in London, but the entire business is carried out in China (design, manufacturing, coding, etc…) So the business is basically 80% chinese. I guess technically the profits are registered to a European country, but the CEO getting the profits was born in China, is a Swedish citizen, and has exclusively worked in the Chinese phone industry in China until this. (I don’t know if he is a dual citizen actually)
I think profits are only one part of the puzzle. Manufacturing being within Europe is very important also because the loss of manufacturing means you are completely reliant on others for basic functions (smartereveryday on YouTube actually has a good example of this but for America), also the wages for workers is another piece.
So how do you count publicly traded companies?
Edit: Good question, here’s my take.
I dislike publicly traded companies regardless of which stock market they list on; but I can see how IF one was listed on a non-US country’s stock market, you could still consider it under the umbrella of that country depending on the investor breakdown. But you would need to find an investor breakdown by country because whoever the big player investors are, are the ones controlling that company now. Are any of them US based? That sucks, US company in my mind. Are there venture capitalist firms involved? Do they own a majority? It gets messy fast and always ends the same. I haven’t considered it much since I dislike public companies anyways.
At this point so many decent companies have been ruined by fiduciary responsibility to investors that I just abandon hope, count them as a lost cause going to shit really fast as soon as a company goes public because they are legally beholden to their investors now, not anyone else.
Even if its listed on say the euro market or canadian market instead of US, they’ll still be subject to enshittification, could have their controlling interests switch to a hostile nation (US) at any moment (edit: case in point, AstraZeneca ditching UK stock market for US), and eventually will be sold out to venture capitalists when the husk is no longer profitable.
Fuck late stage capitalism.
In a case like this I think it is fair to look at how much of the money ends up outside of Europe (roughly). So a Volvo designed in Sweden and built in Slovakia is leaving more money in the EU than a BYD designed and built in China. But not as much as a Volkswagen or Fiat. Though with complex products it can be hard to know what comes from where and with big companies it can be hard to know where profits are spend (perhaps Volkswagen uses their profit to expand their production in China for example).
But I think aside from money earned it is also fair to look at what kind of things might result from that income. For example a product with a chip imported from China might be equal European as a product with a chip imported from Taiwan but since Taiwan is not committing genocide I much rather have them receive that money.
Volvo build at least one car model, arcording to the article, in Slovakia. But they have production plants all arround the world sweden, belgium, denmark, but also china, usa and more. That quite common for car companies that they produce their cars in a lot of countries all arround the world. Usualy a certain model is produced in a plant, most cheaper models are produces in countries with cheaper loan cost. So in general i think it’s hard to say how much money end up in europe.
Totally agree, as a consumer you’re left guessing in a lot of cases. Often there is no black and white set of options.
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