No company, no matter how big, goes through such losses for a small market like Pakistan. Pakistan's entire market of >1300cc cars is about 60K units annually. Even in highly competitive markets like US where 17 MILLION cars are sold each year, the companies never take ANY losses.
The reason you see discounts etc on cars in developed market is because there are two prices MSRP and Invoice/dealer price. E.g. a Honda civic would have a $20K MSRP price listed on honda's website but dealer is actually buying it for $17-18K. This is how dealers are able to sell below the listed price and offer Sales on days like Christmas, Thanksgiving etc. They NEVER sell at a loss.
What SAIC is doing is either deliberately under-invoicing the cars for duty evasion or maybe their actual invoice pricing is quite low (since China doesn't tax exports at all) and that's why we're seeing such low declared values for these MG units coming in.
It'll be interesting how long Afridi's adventure will last, because the Japanese trio won't sit idle and watch while thousands of units are imported by MG each month and sold at competitive prices to their locally manufactured cars.
