Using Google Trends, I think I might have identified the bidders for GXY from the European automotive industry. It appears that at least 3 companies are looking at gxy closely.
First, let’s have a look at the worldwide search trend for gxy.We can ignore Australia and New Zealand as the results are likely to skewed by the fact that gxy is asx listed. The next 3 in line are Singapore, South Africa and Germany. I am going to ignore Singapore as well at the moment as I can’t get data that is granular enough to point to anything.
Let’s have a look at South Africa, it looks like the primary search originated from Gauteng, where BMW and Nissan have built their production plants. Plants and facilities of Mercedes Benz and VW are located at Eastern Cape, which is on the east coast of South Africa.
We then have Germany coming in the fifth on the worldwide ranking. Within Germany, following areas are especially interesting, namely, Bavaria, Baden-Wurttemberg and North Rhine-Wesphalia. (I am ignoring Berlin because it is the capital and thus difficult to identify corporate identity, while Hesse has a VW plant, it is primarily a parts centre).
I think it is clear enough on where the interests from Bavaria and Baden-Wurttemberg might have stemmed from.
The interesting part would be around North Rhine-Wesphalia.
Even though VW has a plant at Dusseldorf, the plant is only a joint venture with MB and is currently a van assembly plant. Thus, it is unlikely that the amount of search volume is generated from VW there.
This means that the volume of search might have originated from this company, which happens to have their HQ in Cologne, North Rhine-Wesphalia. .
If there is ever a bidding war among automotive makers going on, it probably is revolving BMW, Mercedes Benz and Ford Germany. I am not sure where all the buzz around VW and GXY comes from in previous discussions, but judging from Google usage, I am pretty sure that VW is no longer in the race.
