The situation is so complex it is perhaps best to write explanations first.
Hummers were originally the successor to the Jeep only many times bigger. It was technically the M998 High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV/Humvee) and was known as the Hummer in the US Army.
In 1992, AM General began selling cililian version of Humvee under the brand name "Hummer". Daft personalities bought it. It took up a massive amount of room on the road. It swallowed a large amount of petrol. It was vulgar, ostentatious, uneconomical and not the sort of vehicle a decent chap would drive.
In 1998, AM General sold the brand name to General Motors. This was a pretty daft purchase for GM as very soon rocketing petrol price made it a seriously stupid vehicle to drive.
On June 2, 2009, GM announced that the company has had a tentative deal to sell its Hummer brand to Chinese-based Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery.
Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery, which was established in January 2005, specializes in manufacturing of special-purpose vehicles, road and bridge components, construction machinery, new energy and petrochemical equipment.
In May 2007, the company invested RMB1.4 billion to jointly build an industrial zone in Xinjin, Sichuan Province with Sichuan Huatong Investment Holding.
In October 2008, Tengzhong invested RMB3.5 billion to establish a manufacturing base in the Deyang Development Area, Sichuan, producing large-scale wind turbine and petroleum drilling equipment.
Now it has bought the rights to the Hummer. There appears to be little logic behind this decision unless there is a major customer lined up who will take the majority of the production. That customer would have to be the government.
But the English People’s Daily Online said that General Motors indicated that headquarters and operational institutions of Hummer would stay in the United States and the current management would keep their jobs which makes a government purchase unlikely.
The deal will be closed at the end of the third quarter of this year. It is all very odd.
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