TEHRAN, 24 April 2005 — Iranian state-owned carmakers Iran Khodro and Saipa insisted yesterday they had no interest in buying up the bankrupt British-owned MG Rover. “Iran Khodro has no such plan to purchase the British company,” Mojtaba Shivapour, Iran Khodro’s deputy managing director, said in a statement. A spokesman for Saipa, Iran’s second-largest auto manufacturer, also said his company “has no plan to buy Rover.”
An Iranian news report said earlier that Iran Khodro - the largest carmaker in Iran and the Middle East - as well as Saipa were mulling a purchase.
Century-old MG Rover, which has produced the Mini and Jaguar, faces the end of the road after administrators last Friday axed more than 80 percent of its 6,100 workers following a failed tie-up with China’s Shanghai Automotive Industrial Corporation. “We were contacted by Rover a month ago. But because of the undetermined situation of the company, we are not intending to purchase it,” Saipa’s Managing Director Ahmad Ghale Bani told the student news agency ISNA.
On Thursday, Britain’s Daily Telegraph said senior British ministers held a series of meetings with the Iranian government before the collapse of MG Rover, hoping to clear the way for a deal that could have doubled Rover’s worldwide production and perhaps saved the company.
According to the paper, the talks involved an Iranian firm, Dastaan, which had been negotiating with MG Rover since early 2004 over plans to assemble some 150,000 cars each year in eastern Iran - more than the entire output of the MG Rover group in 2004. The Telegraph said Dastaan began to have cold feet as reports reached Tehran about growing difficulties at Longbridge. No money changed hands, it said.
Iran’s giant car producers, half a century old Iran Khodro and Saipa are already the Middle East’s leading manufacturers, and are fast heading to annual production levels of one million units, hoping to emerge as a top regional supplier with 2006 production levels of 1.5 million units. In 2004, Iran Khodro produced 450,000 and Saipa 332,000 units, but have still yet to satisfy even domestic demand. Iran currently exports vehicles to Syria and Bangladesh, but foreign sales of cars and parts only amount to $150 million a year. Iran Khodro is still best known for producing the Paykan — a largely unchanged descendant of the 1960s British Hillman Hunter still rolled out on production lines bought from Britain decades ago.
