8. Прочитайте и текст о роли экономики в автомобильной промышленности и заполните таблицу, отражающую историю этой отрасли автомобилестроения.

When you are in business your prior concern should be given to defining your business, customers and marketing plan. Actually, market and industry structures are interrelated, but sometimes they disintegrate and when this happens to continue to do business as before is almost a guarantee of disaster.

The automobile industry in the early years of this century grew so fast that its market changed drastically. There were four different responses to this change, all of them successful. A change in market or industry structure is a major opportunity for innovation. The early industry till 1900 had basically been a provider of a luxury product for the very rich. Such was the British company Rolls-Royce, founded in 1904. The founders realized that automobiles were growing as plentiful as to become “common”, and set out to build and sell an automobile which would have “the cachet of royalty”.

They deliberately went back to earlier, already obsolete, manufacturing methods in which each car was machined by a skilled mechanic and assembled individually with hand tools. And they promised that the car would never wear out. They designed it to be driven by a professional chauffeur trained by Rolls-Royce for the job, and restricted sales to the titled customers, prizing a car as high as a small yacht, at about forty times the annual income of a skilled mechanic or prosperous tradesman.

A few years later in Detroit; the young Henry Ford also saw that the market structure was changing and the automobiles in America were no longer a rich man’s toy. His response was to design a car that could be totally mass-produced, largely by semiskilled labour; and that could be driven by the owner and repaired by him. The 1908 Model T was not “cheap”: it was priced at a little over what the world’s highest-priced skilled mechanic, the American one; earned in a full year.

Later on, three famous automobile companies refused to face up to the fact that a new decision was needed and as a result they rapidly lost both market position and profitability. Today all three – Chrysler, British Leyland and Peugeot have become more or less marginal. However, three small and quite marginal companies saw in market changes a major opportunity to innovate, they are: Volvo, BMW, and Porsche.

Another American, William Crapo Durant, also saw the change in market structure as an opportunity to put together a professionally managed large automobile company that would satisfy all segments of what he foresaw would be a huge “universal” market. He founded General Motors in 1905, began to buy existing automobile companies, and integrated them into a large modern business.

A little earlier, in 1899, the young Italian Giovanni Angelli had seen that the automobile would become a military necessity, especially as a staff car for offices. He founded FIAT in Turin, which within a few years became the leading supplier of staff cars to the Italian, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian armies.

Market structures in the world automobile industry changed once again between 1960 and 1980. Up to that time the automobile industry had consisted of national supplies dominating national markets. In Italy they were: Fiats and Alfa-Romeos; in France – Renaults, Peugeots, and Citroens; in Germany – Mercedes, Opels, and the German Fords; in the United States – GM cars, Fords, and Chryslers. Then the automobile industry became a “global” one. The example of this is the Japanese, who decided to become world exporters.

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