Innovation Trends of the Chinese Automotive Companies in 2022

Although China ranks first in global production and sales, there is still a gap between the innovation level of the Chinese automobile industry and its potential automobile power. China has to make more efforts to become global-scale leader in the automotive industry. Automotive industry means an industry with high capital, technology intensive and strong industrial relevance. It can not only promote direct and indirect employment and at the same provide tangible contribution to regional GDP production leading remarkable social and economic impacts. With the rapid development of China's automobile industry, it is bound to take the road of autonomy and internationalization, but the global open market and the competition of automobile giants will inevitably bring great challenges to this sector. International leading Chinese automobile enterprises can dominate the global automobile market but to what extend mainly depends on their continuous innovation ability to obtain technical advantages, and then form a strong core competitiveness combined with their resource advantages, brand influence and first mover advantage. In order to survive in the strong market competition and develop sustainably, Chinese automobile enterprises have also improve their innovation ability. Innovation is a complex system engineering. It is a process to form the final product and meet the market demand through systematic market analysis, preliminary research, product planning, development and design, test and trial production. The different ways of combination and configuration of these elements and their structures constitute different modes of innovation. After half a century of development, China's automobile industry has formed a development path with distinctive Chinese characteristics from introduction to independent innovation. Modern enterprise product innovation is a market-oriented system engineering based on the overall concept of products. From the perspective of a single project, product innovation manifested in the breakthrough and improvement of the quality of a technical and economic parameter of the product, including the development of new products and the improvement of old products complemented by minimizing the costs of production exploiting the existing capacities much better. From the overall investigation, product innovation runs through the whole process of product conception, design, trial production and marketing. It is a three-dimensional combined innovation of functional innovation, form innovation and service innovation. In such an external environment, it is particularly important to carefully analyse the problems, advantages and disadvantages of China's automobile industry innovation and choose the correct strategic model, which is the main focal point of this review paper.