PROFESSOR Garel Rhys breezed into the Celtic Manor last week for a breakfast seminar on manufacturing organised by Barclays Bank.

Like a Gatling gun, Mr Rhys delivered a rapid-fire analysis of the world automobile industry.

The Cardiff University-based academic has earned an OBE for his work and cornered the TV market on his specialist subject.

Apparently, since the collapse of the dot coms, car making is once again the world's biggest single industry.

And according to the professor, the lessons being learned at its cutting edge are being applied across the manufacturing piste.

He observed how partnership and trust was supposed to have replaced the adversarial approach in the manufacturers' supply chains.

"But it's interesting to see how - at the first sign of recession - the grape shot was flying around and cost reductions being demanded."

Prof Rhys produced a chart showing the world's most efficient plants.

This was topped by Nissan at Sunderland, with Honda at Swindon second, GM at Eisenach (Germany) third and Toyota at Burmaston fourth. But he made the point that this was supply side economics and it certainly didn't make these plants the world's most profitable.

He produced a table showing cars made per worker.

BMW only manages 9.3 and Mercedes little more at 10. This compares with 21.6 for GM and a massive 29 for Seat.

But, and it's a big but, BMW generates 26,808 euros per vehicle, and Mercedes 34,395. GM can only manage 11,929 and Seat 9,566.

Prof Rhys pointed out that there are no bad cars these days and quality is assumed.

Distinction can only be made by heritage, brand, design and huge financial resources.

The professor was sceptical as to how much premium pricing a good brand will allow.

"For the premier German marques it's now only a third of what it used to be.

"Everybody wants to go upmarket which is logically ridiculous. The marketplace is a pyramid which has more room at its base than its apex."

On technology, the professor admired the work of GKN which realised it had no hope of defending the patents on its constant velocity joints (which enable front-wheel-drive cars to drive and steer at the same time).

"Instead it stayed ahead of the market by concentrating on its technology and constantly improving its product."

He said it was tricky to anticipate consumer needs and manufacturers had to be careful that "the horse (the consumer) wasn't pulling the cart to the knacker's yard".

He observed how all the major manufacturers have become expert at playing governments off against each other when it came to siting (or maintaining) manufacturing operations.

"The tap is now being turned off and the recent decision on Ryan Air has reflected this."

Historically, car makers' prices in various international markets have been a series of smoke and mirrors.

The professor explained that the euro zone is doing a lot in the interests of price transparency.

He anticipated that in the next 10 to 15 years the degree of competition would be more intense than anything witnessed in recent history.

"It will be ultra-competition with no place for the inefficient to hide." Britain has the world's fourth-biggest car market and Professor Rhys claimed this due to the fact that we've become "unimaginably wealthier" in recent decades.

"We've achieved growth of over 2 per cent per annum for the last 12 years. This means we are 38 per cent better off than we were 12 or 13 years ago."

The professor concluded by noting that recent news has made younger generations question whether (given pensions, house prices, and so on) they were as well off as they thought.

A second speaker, Nick Brayshaw, chairman of the CBI's manufacturing committee, made the point that manufacturing companies in the UK not investing sufficient capital.

This has been the real cause of Britain's manufacturing decline rather than all the hot air spouted about union troubles, red tape, taxation and so on.

The British motorcycle industry was historically attractive to entrepreneurs because it had low start-up costs.

But when the Japanese arrived with their capital-intensive production engineering they naturally blew the British out of the water .

But propaganda springs eternal in the CBI minds and Mr Brayshaw damaged his objectivity by claiming the EU's working time directive (curbing long hours) was threatening to drive the UK-based motor racing industry abroad.

I suspect team owners are a really a lot more concerned about the ban on tobacco advertising and sponsorship than on how many hours their mechanics have got left to rebuild the engine in one of their cars.