After India, General Motors Turns Its Back On ASEAN

Company will now only focus on China, Korea, LatAm and the US

- Murali Gopalan

General Motors is clearly in retreat mode.

Barely weeks after it sold its Pune plant in India, the same Chinese buyer, Great Wall Motors, has now snapped up its facility in Thailand. GM has also cut back on operations in Australia and New Zealand, which pretty much means that it has bid adieu to the ASEAN/Asia-Pacific region.

The company’s focus areas will now be South Korea, China, the US and Latin America. Clearly, the decision has been prompted by some hard choices on maintaining a strong bottomline. In the process, it has decided to shelve any plans of going aggressively global.

Time will tell if this was the right decision but, for now, there is no looking back for GM. Who would have possibly thought that the once formidable American auto brand has pretty much been relegated to a more modest status trailing the likes of Volkswagen, Renault-Nissan and Toyota.

This also comes at a time when a top official of the Volkswagen Group told this writer that the company would now look to leverage opportunities in ASEAN from its India operations.

Like GM, VW had done precious little in this part of the world but is still determined to hang in there and fight it out. Its leadership team in Germany has now gone in for a new business model, which will see Skoda and VW come together and achieve economies of scale that will see the rollout of competitively priced SUVs.

Citroen, part of Groupe PSA, has likewise drawn up an ASEAN strategy where India could just end up playing a big role on the lines of what VW is striving to do along with Skoda. GM’s decision to call it quits is, in this backdrop, quite intriguing.