[LINK] "Thailand passes Canada in car production"

[rfmcdonald]

This news item, drawing from a Scotiabank report available here, got a certain amount of coverage locally. I suspect that news items like this are inevitable, inasmuch as the rest of the world catches up to Canada in overall industrial development. For all of its political and economic problems, there are still twice as many Thais as there are Canadians; catch-up per capita inevitably would mean surpassing in totals. (Mexico, too, has leapfrogged ahead of Canada.)

Canada's heft as a maker of automobiles is shrinking, and a new analysis of the world's car industry from Scotiabank suggests we're barely in the Top 10, leapfrogged by Thailand.

In his monthly report, the bank's economist Carlos Gomes says concerted efforts by the Thai government to build up production seem to be working, as the Asian nation produced 68 per cent more cars in January 2013 than it did the same month a year earlier.

Unlike Canada, which exports most of its cars, some 60 per cent of Thai-made vehicles are for the domestic market. And booming demand thanks to a new-car buyer's rebate that the Thai government has implemented until June 2013 is pushing the country to make even more cars to keep up with demand.

The Thai Federation of Industries expects vehicle production to jump 43 per cent in the first quarter of 2013, and a government official recently stated that Thailand could build 2.8 million vehicles this year, up from 2.4 million last year.

"This would enable car and truck production in Thailand to leapfrog past assemblies in Canada," Gomes wrote. He suggests the country could be making 3 million cars a year by 2015.

Gomes's assessment jibes with official data from the International Organization of Motor Vehicle Manufacturers, which shows Canada barely held on to its No. 10 overall ranking last year, with 2,463,732 Canadian-built vehicles.

Thailand built 2,483,043 vehicles in 2012, good enough for ninth overall.