With financial backing from Tencent and Hammer Capital and association with Yicai Global this automotive news portal from China was under the impression they could arrive in Malaysia and ‘tau pau’ all the existing big automotive media houses in Malaysia who have been operation 10 plus or more years with steady growth and strong local following.
Yesterday evening, June 30th they organised a partner conference and dinner at Sheraton Petaling Jaya and from the information we received from an attending automotive Key Opinion Leader (KOL) there were only a small handful of automotive brands present and less than half of them were Chinese automotive brands.
Yes, BYD, Denza, JAECOO, JAC and others were not present at this event.
The automotive brands present only sent low level executives and with legacy automotive brands, just a couple attended (BMW and Proton) and also with just low level executives making their presence felt.
Yes, there were a number of new car showroom owners attending, but they need to answer to their distributors when it comes to working with automotive media houses.
Why are we highlighting this event ….. well just like with automotive website Wapcar that went bankrupt twice in 4 years (first time just 12 months in operation under ownership of a China tech group and the second time just recently whilst under ownership of used car website Carsome), BitAuto came into the Malaysian market with the objective of running down the rest of the established automotive media industry.
They contacted many automotive media houses in recent weeks saying that they will control the media spending of Chinese automotive brands in Malaysia and so we (dsf.my) should come under their control.
Well, we wait and see how long before they will ‘gulung tikar’ just like Wapcar did. 12 months? or shorter perhaps!
