Last night it was revealed that Chinese vehicle manufacturer Zhejiang Youngman Lotus Automobile placed a bid on Saab January 27. This morning reports came in that the administrators had set a condition that any bidder would have to reach an agreement with GM in order to buy entire Saab. Now TTELA reports that Turkish Brightwell Holdings claim that they are in negotiation with GM and that they will submit a bid within shortly.
"In fact, I spoke with them just now," board member of Brightwell Zamier Ahmed told TTELA.
"The discussions are of course highly confidential at this stage and I can not speak for GM. But I must say that I am quite happy, and I believe that we are moving forward."
Brightwell's due diligence on Saab is more or less done and the discussions with the bankruptcy administrators are progressing. Brightwell's plan is still to keep production in Trollhättan and ideally they want Saab to keep producing the Saab 9-5 as well as the 9-3.
"There is no reason to change it [move production] when there's already a world-class factory. How many employees we need will of course depend on the deal, but in the ideal situation, i.e. production of 9-4X and 9-5, we want to start the production as soon as possible. If it turns out that we only get the Phoenix, the production restart will take another several months," Ahmed said.
Ahmed told TTELA that Youngman's bid does not worry Brightwell.
"No, for several reasons. GM has said that they will not allow Chinese investors with respect to the IP rights. In my experience, the bankruptcy administrators are following a process with several stages, and one stage will be to ask for bids from interested parties. It does not worry me that Youngman is enthusiastic. We will await instructions from the administrators."
A blog fueled by enthusiasm about Saab, the greatest car company between the North and the South Pole. And their cars, which probably is the only cars that would start on a cold and crispy South Pole morning.
