A light at the end of the tunnel ...

It seems that Saabs cashflow problems get a solution. After the collapse of the deal with Hawtai Motor Group it looked very bad. But the unstoppable Victor Muller found another partner. Again in China.

On May 16. Saab signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Pang Da Automobile Trade Co.
The big difference to Hawtai is, that Pang Da is a distributor company selling brands like Audi, Mazda, Subaru, Acura, VW, Mercedes, Jeep or Mitsubishi. They are the largest publicly traded distributor on the chinese market with over 1100 dealerships in China and Mongolia.

Due to the fact, that Pang Da does not produce cars, this deal needs less strict approvals from all the authorities than the Hawtai deal. Does it mean it can go quicker ? I don't know.

However to speed up things, Pang Da placed an order for 1300 Saabs worth 30M€ which is the first and so needed cash injection for restarting the production in Trollhattan. In addition Saab has another 5000 orders which needs to be fulfilled after the production restart and it seems that the Saab 9-4X produced in Mexico received good feedback and orders are coming in.

Another part of the MoU is, that Pang Da orders more Saabs for 15M€ within 30 days (from 16.May) under several conditions. Additionally, Pang Da will take an equity stake in Spyker for a total amount of EUR 65 million at EUR 4.19 per share, representing 24 percent of Spyker on a fully diluted basis. You can read the whole press release for example here.

Spyker/Saab has promised to restart production within 7 days.

The future plans are more uncovered in an interview with Pang Da's CEO and founder Pang Qing Hua. He speaks about second round of investment which depends on the success of the framework of cooperation and keeping promises. Very interesting is the part about future production plans. Pang Qing Hua claims, that the manufacturer voice is stronger than the distributors, so Pang Da has to invest into car production as a competitive move. That would be Saab and it should happen within 1-2 years. That would require a partner, possibly one of the chinese car manufacturing companies.


High-level slides about Saab plans presented on Spyker Annual Shareholders Meeting 2011 can be found here. [pdf]

Today Saab has published an open letter to the world summarising all this. It is a good text with a very positive sounding messages.

Now everything seems to be fine. There is still a lot of work to do. Let's hope the result will be good selling figures.

Good luck Saab.

sources : saabsunited.com, photo : kerim from saabunderground.cz