Our Uni insist we stay away from the internet, and I kind of agree. Its hard to tell fact from fiction in some cases, and it rarely has an author, which makes correct referencing a pain. But in some cases, like yours, its hard to find information anywhere else.
Have you tried your Uni library? I notice you study at Sunderland. I don't know how good their library is, but have you looked for any journal articles? Mine, (Northumbria) has 2 floors dedicated to journal articles (which seem to be primarily business and finance orientated, which is a pain when you want something related to Geography!!) I've just looked at the UNN library catalogue, but there is nothing based on the Rover/SAIC era (something on the BMW days).
Worth a try I guess, but articles from reputable newspaper might have some good info, not sure how you go about that though.
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Thanks! Some more good suggestions there, will have a good look through them all soon.
I just realised I'd be better copying and pasting the question so that you can see exactly what I'm supposed to be doing:
3. From a business perspective, explain recent events leading to the takeover of MG Rover by the Chinese car marker Nanjing Automotive [July 2005]. Why did the much-heralded link up with the Shanghai Automotive Corporation [SAIC] expected in early 2005 not occur? What do you judge to be the prospects for MG Rover?s UK plant and workforce into 2006? Why do you come to these conclusions?
I think I'll have a check on our library website and see if I can find any journals, our library isn't bad, but I'll be a bit suprised if it's better than Northumbria's. Not that I normally venture into the library if I can help it! Suppose it's going to be a necessary evil though!
Blue
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Why don't I get interesting questions like this? Why do I have to answer annoying questions on disintermediation instead? ;)
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Autocar 26 April 2005 had a very good article on what went wrong etc. If you can't get hold of a copy, let me know and I will send you a photocopy of it. My email is in my profile.
What is disintermediation? Sound painful.
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I'd go on to the Telegraph website, and search for articles in the business section.
Your Uni probably has access to back issues of the Financial Times and Times as well - which are paid for services.
I'm sure in one of those papers there will be a 2,500 word essay on Rover.
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2,500 words? Huh!
MG Rover made carp cars that no one wanted to buy. The directors siphoned the money into personal pension funds. SAIC deliberately pecked at the wounded bird to starve it, keep other predators away, and steal bits of the remains they wanted. There is no future of any kind for building rovers in longbridge as there is nothing left there that anyone wants
There - 62 words is all you need. Easy this university lark init.
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TourVanMan TM < Ex RF >
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And no essay on British manufacturing decline would be complete without some mention of the unions.
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I'm doing the wrong course.
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Try the University of Life. Far better.
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I study at that one too mate! :-)
Blue
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Find out who the administrators were and try and get hold of copies of their reports. Reports would have been prepapred for the courts and for the creditors, and these are supposed to explain not only the reason for the onset of insolvency but also for the steps taken subsequently, and the reasons therefore. If you can find a creditor, you might get a full set of reports.
It will obviously be only one point of view, but it is at least supposed to be objective.
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>>Find out who the administrators were
they were PwC (PriceWaterhouseCoopers)
Seem to remember reading quite a bit on their website when they were initially called in. Not been back so dont know if they have updated it with further details.
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Nobody could have taken over the company as the pension deficit was too high. This was never ever a runner. A number of ailing companies that previously might have been taken over at least by asset strippers are now safe because their pension deficit is in effect a poison pill, BA for example. Point to bear in mind.
Someone could and obviously did buy the assets off the liquidator, why this was Nanjing and not SAIC I can't say, perhaps merely a higher offer.
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Question makes a bit more sense now. Explaining the events is a simple timeline as each event in the collapse led inevitably to the next.
You're being asked why the SAIC tie up proposed before the administrators were called in didn't happen, not why Nanjing beat them to the assets afterwards. So that part of the question centres around why SAIC didn't find MG Rover attractive enough when it was still trading. You'll need to check the facts, but I suspect a pivotal issue in that was that SAIC discovered they would have been taking on certain financial liabilities, and that MGR's trading performance may have been worse than realised. Like any other business in this kind of situation, SAIC concluded that since its prime interest lay in the assets and intellectual property of MGR it was probably best to wait until they became available more cheaply - i.e., wait and see if it was going to go into administration.
Technically, the question is a poor one. Nanjing didn't 'take over' MGR, it bought assets from an administrator and the two are very different things. Similarly, I'm not sure the 'take over' was 'much-heralded'. It was surrounded by uncertainty and doubt, doubt which remains to this day as the only significant events post Najing's acquisition of the assets has been the transfer of some machinery from Longbridge to China.
Finally, Longbridge no longer has a workforce. Most went months ago. There may be some limited production when Nanjing has sorted out what it's doing in China (which remains its real priority, whatever reassuring noises are made) but the prospects for the 'workforce' are jobs elsewhere, the prospects for the plant are largely centred around property development.
Fascinating subject though. You're writing about the death of an industry.
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I'm pleased that my ideas were along the correct lines, the one thing that I was planning on mentioning with regards the SAIC deal was pensions! :-)
The more I read around the company, a lot of it based on the (unusually) subjective Auston Rover website, the more interesting the story of Rover becomes. It really didn't stand a chance given the position that it was in, and I do honestly believe from my reading that the unions were largely responsible for starting the rot in the late sixties and seventies, and that consequent bad management failed to save it despite a few opportunities, but that isn't really the point of the question, so I can only write an brief introduction to cover that period in history. :-(
Blue
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Bear in mind, too, the inexorable logic in waiting until the business had failed. It is far, far cheaper to manufacture in China because of much lower labour costs, so buying assets out of a defunct business and taking them back to China would always be a much more cost-effective method of producing cars than buying a UK-based trading business, taking on all the staff, the contractual trading relationships with comparatively expensive local suppliers and other liabilities. But underlying MGR's failure was the fact that it was an under-capitalised business saddled with old designs whose sales were falling away.
The rot, as you call it, probably goes back to the 1950s. I think most dispassionate observers would say that management was just as culpable as the unions, if not more so. They were complacent, didn't invest enough in engineering and design, didn't have the commercial savvy of the American-owned manufacturers like Ford, and didn't wake up to the scale of the Japanese threat until too late.
Even in the 1960s Labour itself realised that the unions were representing their members' interest in a manner that was intrinsically damaging to the economy, and tried to introduce legislation that sought more sensible arrangements (Barbara Castle's 'In Place of Strife'). They failed to get it through Parliament, and we had to wait until the 1980s for Margaret Thatcher to take some pretty draconian action against the unions. By then, though, it as too late for large-scale manufacturing, which had become structurally inefficient.
You can find chapter and verse about the British motor industry's decline in a book called 'Wheels of Misfortune' by Jonathan Wood. Well out of print now, I suspect, but ask your local public library to try to find a copy.
MGR probably did stand a chance when BMW decided to sell, but not as a large-scale manufacturer. It's best option was the low volume MG sportscar route proposed by Jon Moulton of the venture capital firm Alchemy. I suspect political vested interests scuppered that one too.
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It's finshed, it's finished! :-)
Just completed all 3,180 words of it.
Thanks to all who contributed to this thread, I've managed to use a good few of the suggestions in the thread, and basically the story as I've told it is pretty much how people have described it in short posts on this thread, I just managed to go into 3,000 plus word detail about it and manged to link it to the rise in income of the Chinese middle classes and government controls on Chinese personal borrowing, pretty swish. :-)
Anyway, want to go to bed now or I won't get up to hand it in!
Blue
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Well done Blue. Any possibility of uploading a PDF of the thesis to an FTP somewhere so we can all have a read??
Happy Motoring Phil I
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I don't mind doing that at all, but I'm not sure what you'll all think, it's ended up as basically just another version of the MG Rover story that pulls on parts of other existing stories at BBC News site, and the Austin-Rover site, with a *little* added analysis of the Chinese Economy thrown in for good measure.
I've stressed the word "little" as I could write 3,000 plus words about the Chinese Economy alone and barely scratch the surface, never mind trying to inclide the full details of Rover's demise! :-)
Could e-mail a copy to anyone who's interested? I've got no registration with any FTP sites are anything like that, unless it's possible to post it in the HJ webspace at MSN?
Blue
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Not sure you can post docs on the MSN site Blue but I'd quite fancy having a read of it myself if that's ok?
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And post a short advert for TVMs patented "Plagiarism detection program defeater macro"
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TourVanMan TM < Ex RF >
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Now I've been very careful to source everything I've used. I think they'll just be glad to have something different to read, everyone else chose to do a project on free trade.
Erm, actually, come to think of it, maybe that's because there have been actual books written about that subject...
Adam, will send it via e-mail soon, got to go now though as it does need to be handed in quite urgently!
Blue
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Adam you've got mail.
Blue
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