Hyundai Motor on Tuesday confirmed it wanted to increase its stake in its China commercial vehicle joint venture, Sichuan Hyundai Motor, following a review of its operations in the world's largest vehicle market.
Sichuan Hyundai Motor is based in Ziyang city in Sichuan province and makes a broad range of Hyundai commercial vehicles, from light buses and trucks to the heavy-duty Xcient road tractor. It is a 50:50 joint venture between Sichuan Nanjun Automobile Group (CNJ Automobile) and Hyundai Motor.
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Hyundai wants to increase its stake to 100% and would then look to improve its competitiveness of the company which has been struggling with poor sales in recent years along with Hyundai's other Chinese joint ventures.
In the first nine months of the year, Sichuan Hyundai sold just 2,500 vehicles.
A number of foreign vehicle manufacturers have also expressed their desire to increase their stakes in their local manufacturing joint ventures after the Chinese government began to relax its foreign ownership regulations last year, including Volkswagen and BMW.
Hyundai's overall sales in China have been in sharp decline since the political fall out in 2016 over South Korea's deployment of the THAAD missile defence shield provided by the US.
In the first nine months of 2019, Hyundai's total sales in the country declined by 21% to 443,408 units from 561,152 sales in the same period of last year.
