(Yicai Global) April 2 -- SAIC-Volkwagen Automotive, the joint venture between China’s biggest carmaker SAIC Motor and Germany’s Volkswagen, has appointed the vice president of SAIC to head its sales business and shifted the top sales executive to its new Audi arm.

47-year-old Yu Jingmin will take up the roles of executive vice president of sales and marketing at SAIC Volkswagen and president of SAIC Volkswagen Sales, the Shanghai-based JV said yesterday.

He replaces Jia Mingdi who has been transferred to the JV’s Audi division as executive vice president.

Yu, who joined Shanghai-based SAIC in 2000 and has served in various roles from regional general manager to sales director before reaching the heights of vice president of the group, has a knack for sales. Last year he took to live streaming to help shift cars and at one point had a record concurrent audience of 500,000 people.

However, he will have his work cut out for him in his new posting. The JV has seen shipments slide in the last few years due to intense competition and a dip in popularity after disappointing quality test results. Last year sales plunged 25 percent to 1.5 million vehicles.

Jia, who was head of sales at the JV for over a decade, enters new territory with the Audi venture. There has been considerable resistance to the project as Audi, which is owned by Wolfsburg-based Volkswagen, has another JV, FAW Volkwagen, which makes its cars in China and which was not in favor of the deal.

The differences have slowly been ironed out and the first SAIC Audi model, the A7L, is expected to roll off SAIC’s newly built production lines early next year. Pre-sales should start before the end of this year.

Last December it was agreed that sales of SAIC Audi vehicles will still be channeled through Audi’s existing sales network in China, meaning that they will not be using the SAIC-Volkswagen channels that Jia is familiar with.

Editor: Kim Taylor