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SAIC Motor PHL hopes lightning strikes twice in the MG ZS

- By Kap Maceda Aguila

IT MAY BE a little hard to remember now, but try to recall before the days of the Chinese brand boom here. Though spoiled for choice, we had 25 or so less brands then than we do today.

The Chinese marque “glow-up” was still in its infancy, and its automotive aspirations were arguably best represented by Morris Garages (or more famously, MG). To be honest, The Covenant Car Company, Inc. (TCCCI), then the local steward of the brand, was consciously pushing MG’s British origins leveraging on its history that stretched back to the 1920s. China’s biggest auto conglomerate, SAIC Motor, based in Shanghai, has owned the brand since 2007 — the year it acquired Nanjing Automobile Corp., the firm that had originally bought MG from the MG Rover Group.

Whatever the Philippine distributor did when it took the reins the brand beginning in 2018 obviously worked — particularly in the case of the crossover ZS, which became a posterchild for China-made vehicles. The once-derogatory “made in China” tag started to become a positive for many buyers — evidenced in the improved interest in vehicles coming from our neighbor to the north.

A package of good and focused styling, right pricing, and upmarket features saw the ZS not only do well but actually prop up the numbers for MG here. In 2021 alone, the MG Philippine dealership network sold 5,209 units — 4,000 of which were ZS units. Today, the cumulative total stands at more than 22,000.