, Columnist
China's Bountiful Gift to Volkswagen
Carmakers with existing joint ventures will find them hard to unpick.
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As a measure of China's importance to western carmakers, Volkswagen AG is tough to beat. Evercore ISI estimates the country contributed 43 percent of the German giant's pretax profit last year.
So any change to rules governing local joint ventures is potentially very significant. Yet China's plan to liberalize ownership restrictions on local joint ventures was met with barely a shrug from European stock markets on Tuesday. This suggests VW, Daimler AG and others haven't been gifted a wad of cash by Beijing.