Bold new Chinese Racing bid unveiled

The head diameter of the inlet valves were just14.5 mm with a stem diameter of 3.8 mm for an all up weight of just 9 grams. Legendary tuner and engine builder, Nobby Clarke, at that time in Honda’s employ, used tweezers to put the Honda valve gear together. The entire machine, sans liquids, weighed just 85 kilograms.

Despite its technological prowess, the Japanese motorcycle industry took a long time to shake off the fundamentally racist sneers and “Riceburner” remarks that were common in the unenlightened sixties and seventies, despite a clear performance and reliability edge.

The “Made in Japan” tag that was initially perceived as inferior and cheap, eventually meant the exact opposite as Japanese industry’s superior design and manufacturing processes left all but a handful of prestige marques in its wake.

From the mid-sixties through the mid-nineties, Japan’s motorcycle industry remained dominant in sales too, though the Chinese manufacturing collossus was by then beginning to make its presence felt in Asian markets.

The output of the Japanese motorcycle industry (Honda led the charge, but Yamaha, Suzuki and Kawasaki all followed suit in creating products which demanded and achieved global recognition) was surpassed several years ago as the world’s leading producer of motorcycles and more than half the world’s annual motorcycle production is now produced in the Chinese provinces of Chongqing (the new motorcycle capital of the world), Guangdong and Zhejiang.

Quoting the excellent report “Modularization in the Chinese Motorcycles Industry” available online from ICMR Case Studies and Management Resources (IMCR) for just INR 500 (US$11.80) : “In the 1990s, China's motorcycles production grew at an average annual rate of 46 per cent … from less than 50,000 units in 1980 to 10 million in 1997.” The vast majority of motorcycles produced in China are to this day clones of Japanese motorcycles. The aforementioned ICMR Case Study addresses this in detail: “The Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry statistics indicated that China produced about 11 million motorcycles in 2002, nine million of which were imitations of existing Japanese products.”

It is now commonly acknowledged that both Japan and Korea evolved their world standard manufacturing industries by initially copying existing products, then developing their own designs once their expertise had reached world class. The development of the strategy of Chinese industry to copy existing products and indeed, steal Intellectual Property wholesale, is covered in extraordinary detail in this Popular Science article by Dan Koeppel – extraordinarily well researched, the article is worth a read because Haojue’s strategy, at least via Maxtra, is clearly now focussed on achieving world class using designs it has paid for, at the same time as developing the knowledge to go forward under its own expertise.

Put simply, the Maxtra Project portends a fundamental change in the global motorcycle industry. With China possessing the cheapest skilled labour force in the world, and an almost endless supply of human labour available for the coming decades, the Japanese motorcycle industry is set for a massive battle to retain its mantle.

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