General Motors Corp., the world's No. 1 automaker, announced its strongest first-quarter performancein China with 122,097 autos sold, surging 69.9 percent over the same peroid of last year.

According to its statistics, GM reaped 275 million US dollars in profits in the Asia-Pacific region alone in the three-month period, up 200 million dollars from the first quarter of 2003 and accounting for 21 percent of its global profits of 1.3 billion dollars so far this year.

The rising sales in China of Shanghai GM, a joint venture between GM and the Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation, and GM's outstanding performance in the Indian market had greatly boosted the company's Asia-Pacific market share from last year's 4.3 percent to the present 4.7 percent, said GM's Chairman and CEO Richard Wagoner.

Wagoner said he was happy to see GM was building up its foothold in China, and GM would continue to try to retain its highgrowth rate and sound financial performance by improving productivity and product quality.

Many remained to be done, he said, to raise GM's profitability as the company faced increasingly fierce competition, rising production cost and fluctuating exchange rates.

The 96-year-old auto giant sells around 8.6 million vehicles innear 200 countries and regions last year, taking up 15 percent of the global auto market share. So far, it has sunk more than 1.5 billion dollars into the Chinese market since it first entered China in 1997.

Source: Xinhua