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Shanghai Traffic
credits: Itamar & Fabiane Medeiros

China may produce more than 8.6 million vehicles this year as it narrows the gap with Japan and the United States, the world’s top two auto makers, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

In 2003, China turned out 4.44 million vehicles and sold out 4.37 million, an increase of 36.6 percent and 34.5 percent respectively over the previous year. Among them, there were 2.01 million cars with 1.97 million. of them sold, up 84.4 percent and 80.7 percent respectively. China then outran France to become the world’s fourth large auto manufacturer.

China’s economic growth, averaging about 10 percent over the past five years, is raising demand for automobiles and has boosted production from about 100,000 vehicles a year in the 1980s to 7.28 million last year, making the country the world’s third-biggest vehicle producer.

“The industry is facing a grave overproduction situation,” the official Xinhua News Agency quoted Chen Bin, deputy director of the commission’s industrial department, as saying. China’s annual vehicle output capacity was already at eight million complete units, with a further 2.2 million units of annual capacity under construction and soon due to be completed. Without government action to curb investment, China’s auto factories could be turning out up to 20 million vehicles a year by 2010, Chen said.

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