General Motors has announced it will withdraw from the Indonesian market by the end of March 2020 following years of poor performance.
The announcement was made by GM Southeast Asia's president Hector Villarreal, in which he acknowledged the difficult decision was made due to the company's limited potential for growth in this market amid strong competition from Japanese automakers and the recent entrance of new competitors from China.
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GM has a patchy history in Indonesia, having withdrawn the Opel brand in the late 1990s, during the Asia financial crisis, only to launch the Chevrolet brand the following decade mainly with products sourced from South Korea and Thailand. In 2013 the company completed a US$150m refurbishment of its plant in Bekasi, just east of the capital city Jakarta, to produce the Chevrolet Spin compact MPV.
The Spin struggled to gain a significant foothold in the Indonesian market amid strong competition from the Honda Mobilio and other similarly-sized Japanese MPVs and the plant was closed down just over a year after it had started operations. After that GM continued to sell a more limited range of vehicles sourced mainly from South Korea and Thailand, also with very limited success.
Last year the company sold just 2,500 vehicles in Indonesia, with volumes falling further to 958 units in the first nine months of 2019.
The closure of its sales operations leaves GM with just an indirect presence in Indonesia, through its share of the Chinese SAIC-GM-Wuling Automobile joint venture, which has a plant in Indonesia and sales of just over 17,000 vehicles last year.
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By GlobalDataFord Motor also withdrew from Indonesia in 2014, also due to its poor sales performance in the country – based on products imported mainly from Thailand.
