0 KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER IN THE CHINESE AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY

The automotive industry has been subject to a turbulent shift in the last decades as its markets, production and focus has shifted its center of gravity towards the East, specifically to China. When Western automotive companies seek to establish themselves on the Chinese automotive market they have been forced to engage in joint ventures with Chinese counterparts. As the motivation for the Chinese partners is to accumulate knowledge, experience and competencies from their mature and sophisticated Western partners, the Western partners are faced with the difficult process of transferring competencies and knowledge that have been accumulated over long periods of time and which can be tacit or hard to codify. The question of how to transfer knowledge and competencies successfully to their Chinese joint venture subsidiaries therefore becomes evident. Our aim with this thesis was to identify how Western multinational corporations can upgrade the competencies of their joint venture subsidiaries in China through the transfer of knowledge. We engaged in research of empirical data concerning both the problems faced by the Chinese automotive industry as well as the study of how Western parent firms successfully can transfe