China's auto industry should forge its own brands through international cooperation to compete with foreign auto manufacturers in China, the world's third largest auto market.

To independently develop technologies for auto production and create world class brands of its own will be an inevitable trend in China's auto industry development, said Hu Maoyuan, president of the Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation (SAIC), China's biggest car producer, also one of the world top 500 businesses in 2004, at a seminar of the Fortune Global Forum on Asia's auto industry on Tuesday.

Some 5 million autos were sold in 2004 and more than 570,000 in this year's first quarter in China. However, foreign brands made in China occupy over 90 percent of China's market.

Joint ventures are a mainstay in China's auto industry, where technology and the development of brands are tightly controlled by foreign shareholders, said Hu.

"Under the trend of economic globalization, however, to develop China's own auto brand has never meant that we don't need international cooperation, instead we should make full use of the international resources and attract the participation of foreign auto producers while giving due protection to the property rights of foreign competitors," said Hu.

Hu said other than totally relying on ourselves, there are more choices to develop China's own auto brands.

"One is through buying foreign auto enterprises, another is to develop China's own brands with foreign partners," he said.