Chinese Government Bought 20% of Local Audis in 2008

There's no doubt the Chinese government is a large organization since we're talking about a country in which the population exceed 1 billion people. But the government is apparently spending millions of dollars on auto purchases which would be fairly impressive given the fact that we're currently living in recession time. Anyway, to get straight to the point, a post on chinacartimes.com revealed that the Chinese government purchased no less than 20 percent of all Audis sold in China in 2008.

To give you an idea on Audi's Chinese sales, the German manufacturer sold a total of 12,156 vehicles in China in April, which represents a 21 percent increase compared with the same month of the previous year.

And getting back to curious government figures, the aforementioned source wrote that "provincial heads, and mayors can buy a car with a displacement upto 3.0L, and must be priced less than 450,000rmb ($65,000USD)". Additionally, "vice provincial heads, and vice mayors can spend up to 350,000rmb ($51,000USD)."

Back in 2000, the Chinese government purchased no less than 39,500 vehicles, with figures obviously increased in the last few years. For instance, in 2007, the officials acquired approximately 500,000 vehicles, which means they invested around 80 billion rmb (nearly 12 billion US dollars). Furthermore, BMW expects to sell no less than 10,000 cars to the Chinese government this year, which could increase this year's figures as well.

That being said, in case these stats are indeed accurate, we're not sure what the reason would be for the Chinese government not turning their eyes to locally produced cars. This would have meant an important support for the domestic auto sector.