Continental enters mobility services JV in China

In order to increase its activities in the new mobility services market, Continental has signed a strategic joint venture contract with China Unicom Smart Connection (CUSC), an end-to-end service and operations provider for the connected car market and fully owned subsidiary of mobile network operator China Unicom. The contract was signed on 19 April and creates a joint venture that, in Continental’s words, “aims to establish and operate as a world class ITS solution provider to satisfy the increasing market demands in China.”

Each company possesses a 50 per cent share in the new, Shanghai-based joint venture, Unicom Continental Intelligent Transportation Technology (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. The joint venture will focus on vehicle data services and applications, intelligent vehicle applications as well as connected vehicle software and hardware integration solutions. The first products that will be offered in the Chinese Market are services from the vAnalytics product family, such as Fleet+, a mobility service product providing end to end on-demand car sharing platform for OEMs, and the TSP2.0 telematics service platform product, which provides vehicle data driven services for OEMs as well as their partners through embedded hardware and cloud-based backend computing.

China is one of the leading markets for mobility services and for vehicle connectivity. “The trend towards digitalisation is opening a growing market for mobility services in China for us. We see major opportunities for our accelerated, profitable growth in this market,” said Helmut Matschi, head of Continental’s Interior division. “With the JV, we will move forward in the area of Mobility Services. Our JV partner China Unicom is one of the top three mobile carriers in China with a strong automotive experience but as well access to high-potential service market. This is the perfect strategic fit for us.”