Shanghai, April 25:

Booming music, flashy presentations and performances by scantily clad, violin-sawing women are all part of global automakers’ hustle to court the Chinese customer at the Shanghai auto show.

But amid the deafening noise, the glare of hot lights and the maddening crowds at the week-long car show in China’s financial hub, the stands of the world’s most exclusive luxury car makers are an oasis of relative quiet.

As scores of mostly men gather around to snap photos of wafer-thin models posing in front of Volkswagen and General Motors cars amid hovering salesman, the likes of Bentley and Rolls Royce prefer their cars to speak for themselves. “We don’t want to be loud and in fact we don’t need to be,” said Bill Cheng, general manager for China operations for Bentley, producers of some of the globe’s most expensive and exclusive hand-made cars. “Bentley is truly about luxury and is very low profile. Our customers know that.”

Such an understated approach is of course made easier when automakers like Bentley, whose newly unveiled Arnage sedan retails for $839,000, can turn to its top secret customer list. “Our customers are not walking in. They are special customers who are already on our lists and are invited,” said Kingston Chang, business manager for Bentley China.

China, with its booming economy that last year summed several hundred thousand millionaires and 15 billionaires, is now a key luxury market. Sales of high-end cars in 2006 totalled 150,000 units, according to market research firm CCID Consulting. The firm estimates that over the next five years sales are projected to jump to 400,000.

Bentley’s Chang said that by the end of the Shanghai show on Saturday he expects to have booked about 20 new orders or about 10 per cent of the cars it expects to deliver in China this year, up from 127 in 2006 and 64 in 2005. “It’s tremendous growth,” he said.

For Rolls Royce, the China market is growing so quickly that it is now expanding into the country’s less developed interior with a showroom in the southwestern city of Chengdu, said Ian Robertson, chairman and CEO of Rolls Royce.

“China is a very important market for Rolls-Royce, with sales in 2006 growing by more than 60 per cent, making the region our third largest market in the world behind the USA and the UK,” Robertson said.

At Spyker, Holland’s maker of hand-crafted sports cars, supply can’t keep up with China’s demand for its 5.88 million yuan ‘Beijing to Paris’ SUV model, its first foray into the segment. But selling to China’s wealthy, whose average age at 35 to 45 years is a decade younger than the average buyer in Europe, the US or Japan, also means catering to Chinese sensitivities.

“Many will say that sports cars are not really useful, but we try and show that you don’t have to race a sports car, but rather it’s a type of lifestyle,” said Zhu. “Chinese like to be paid attention to and be taken care of so we make sure we organise high-end even-ts for them,” said Zhu, describing invitation-only golf weekends, exclusive test drives and dinners.

World’s biggest manufacturers

PARIS: Top 10 manufacturers in 2006:

1. General Motors (US): 9.09m

2. Toyota (Japan): 9.04m

3. Ford (US): 6.6m

4. Volkswagen: 5.7m

5. DaimlerChrysler: 4.7m

6. Nissan (Japan): 3.47m

7. PSA Peugeot-Citrokn: 3.36m

8. Honda (Japan): 2.72m

9. Renault (France): 2.43m

10. Hyundai-Kia: 1.61m. — AFP