Multinational Carmakers’ Regional Strategies

Abstract

The automobile sector is often presented as the archetypal global industry. In this view, the car business is one of the main drivers behind the homogenization of the world. This chapter is an attempt to deconstruct a representation that neglects the heterogeneity of firms and areas; the great diversity of the strategies being pursued; and the inherent contradictions of the competitive process. Without purporting to analyse carmakers’ internationalization strategies in their entirety,² it delves into issues relating to those regionalization strategies (Freyssenet and Lung, 2001) that carmakers are most likely to follow in their attempts to rebuild at a regional (supranational) level a modicum of coherency between productive systems and automobile markets — coherencies that no longer necessarily materialize at the national level that had once (during the postwar boom years) been the arena within which they could regulate themselves.