German investment in China’s auto industry has been one of the few bright spots as foreign investment has slowed to a crawl.
Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, met with executives of Saudi Aramco, BMW, Toyota Motor, FedEx and dozens of other foreign companies at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Friday as China seeks to boost foreign investment amid worsening trade relations between China and the United States.
It was the third time that Mr. Xi has met with executives of multinationals in the past 17 months, courting investment as sluggish growth and tightening national security laws have made global companies wary of making big bets in China.
Fresh foreign investment in China has dropped substantially over the past several years. One exception is the German automotive industry, which sees China, the world’s largest car market, as a place to try to compete with increasingly formidable domestic automakers.
German automakers represented half of new investments from the European Union last year, according to Rhodium Group, a consulting firm. BMW has upped its stake in a Chinese joint venture, and this week announced it would use artificial intelligence technology developed with Chinese tech giant Alibaba in its in-car assistant.
A huge new electric car factory by Volkswagen in central China was one of the few new manufacturing facilities built by foreign firms in China last year. Volkswagen has also purchased a small stake in a Chinese automaker, Xpeng, as part of an approach it describes as “in China, for China.”