After 30 years of development, China’s auto accessory industry has reached a stage of rapid expansion, increasingly well-defined division-of-labor, and service diversification. As China now has the world’s largest automobile market, the demand for accessories there is enormous and the requirements imposed upon them are increasingly stringent in terms of both product quality and vendor services.

A large number of Chinese auto-accessory suppliers are still in the stage of incipient development. They have a limited scale of operations; their potential for development, however, is unlimited.

China became the world’s biggest auto market last year, when it pulled ahead of the United States with sales of about 12 million new cars. This brought the total number of automobiles on the country’s streets and roads to more than 70 million, providing solid support for the ongoing rapid growth of the country’s auto-accessory industry.

Last year saw the departure from the Chinese market of a number of weak auto-accessory makers. This is good news for the survivors, who are now in a better position to escape cutthroat price competition in the absence of some of their price-slashing rivals. This will enable them to devote more resources to the development of newer and better products, and to provide the improved quality and services they need to further expand their global sales.


Guangzhou, in Guangdong Province, is one of the largest business hubs for auto accessories in the world and the center of an expanding auto-accessory industrial cluster in southern China.

The Guangzhou Automobile Parts Association (GAPA) is charged with regulating the market and maintaining market order in the southern part of the country. At the present time it is promoting evaluation standards for auto-accessory shops and attempting to set up a standardized, reliable, and healthy distribution system.

GAPA hopes to regulate the industry from manufacturing to terminal services, and to put pressure on suppliers to constantly upgrade the quality and safety of the products and the quality and reliability of their services. Its ultimate goal is to extend this effort throughout China so as to promote healthy competition.

Other auto-related associations are paying attention. A senior official of the China Auto Fitting Industry Federation (CAFIF) notes that his organization is vigorously promoting GAPA’s evaluation standards in other provinces including Hunan, Fujian, Anhui, Sichuan, Henan, and Yunnan. The official adds that the CAFIF will also work with automobile and auto-parts exhibitions, such as the China Zhengzhou Auto Accessories Fair and the Guangzhou Auto Show, to help China’s auto-accessory manufactures move into the world arena.

The CAFIF has signed agreements for cooperation with the two shows named above, aiming to promote industry standards among Chinese auto-accessory makers and international fair attendees as well.

Other CAFIF goals include the establishment of a credit-evaluation system for the auto-accessory industry, under which companies that gain credit certification will be eligible for the guarantees they need to obtain loans from banks.


(by CENS)