By Warren Brown
Sunday, October 29, 2006

NEW YORK

New Yorkers still call it the Chrysler Building, a brick and steel structure with 77 floors above ground at East 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue.

For one year, from 1930 after it opened until 1931 when it was eclipsed by the Empire State Building, it was the tallest building in the world.

Today, both structures have been surpassed in height and grandeur by skyscrapers in Shanghai, Malaysia and elsewhere. And there are several lessons in that, all of them having to do with the relentless realities of global competition.

The Chrysler Building was commissioned in 1926 by Walter P. Chrysler when Chrysler was a corporation and the American automobile industry was king. It is an art deco structure, almost brazen in presentation, bedecked with replicas of Chrysler's 1929 automobile eagle hood ornaments on the 61st floor and with massive copies of the company's 1929 winged radiator caps on the 31st.

But Chrysler no longer owns the building. It is now co-owned by two real estate companies -- 75 percent by TMW Real Estate and 25 percent by Tishman Speyer Properties.

Chrysler is no longer an independent U.S. corporation. After escaping bankruptcy with federal help in the early 1980s, inventing the minivan in 1984, and regaining both product traction and profitability in the mid-1990s, it sold out to Germany's Daimler-Benz AG in 1998 and became part of a remade, Stuttgart-based company, DaimlerChrysler AG.

Today, beset by rising gasoline prices and falling sport-utility vehicle sales, not to mention intense competition from domestic and Asian rivals alike, Chrysler is on the skids again.

There are even whispers in Stuttgart that DaimlerChrysler executives are considering changing their corporate name back to Daimler-Benz, something that would be accomplished by selling the financially lackluster Chrysler Group to someone else.

Those whispers became steady murmurs last week when Chrysler reported a third-quarter loss of $1.5 billion -- no small amount of money for a relatively small car company.

It was interesting, as noted in the Financial Times and other journals and confirmed in background talks with Chrysler officials, that DaimlerChrysler's German leaders refused to rule out the sale of the U.S. unit to another company, just as they have long refused to rule out a joint venture with a Chinese car company to give Chrysler the small cars that it now needs.

And here the competitive pot boils hotter.

DaimlerChrysler officials have confirmed that they have been in serious, ongoing negotiations with the government-owned Chery Automotive Co. of Wuhu, China, to handle future development and manufacture of small cars for Chrysler.

Nothing has been decided yet. And there are many obstacles to any proposed Chrysler-Chery venture, including possible opposition from the United Auto Workers union in the United States.

But there are also many things that make a Chrysler-Chery venture enticing to executives on both sides of the talks.

Chery isn't hiding its intentions of entering the U.S. market, possibly by 2008. Linking with Chrysler would give it a ready-made distribution network.

Chery has demonstrated its ability to build high-quality small cars inexpensively and profitably, something the Chrysler Group sorely needs.

And forming a Chrysler-Chery partnership would give DaimlerChrysler -- or Daimler-Benz, if the company chooses to return to that name -- the grand entrance into the booming Chinese car business that it wants. That access would be especially helpful to the German company now that Chery has joined the world's largest online business-to-business components sourcing portal.

The sourcing consortium includes GlobalAutoIndustry.com, Shanghai KOWIN Automotive Components Co. and the global sourcing division of Chery. Consortium members claim that they are able to quickly link automobile manufacturers with the highest-quality, lowest-cost Chinese parts suppliers -- a boon to any company trying to make it in the highly competitive, capital-intensive car business nowadays.

It makes one wonder: Chery is one of the fastest-growing car companies in the world. It's been around only nine years but is rolling in cash -- probably enough to buy the Chrysler Group and the Chrysler Building here, if it chooses to do so.

Imagine that: the tallest China-owned building in the United States. It's not impossible.