Screen Shot 2016-01-28 at 7.19.50 pm

Ford is planning to end sales of it’s cars in Japan and Indonesia by the end of this year, including the Focus, Fiesta and Mustang and some of the company’s SUV models. Ford has been selling cars in Japan for years, since 1974 in fact but last year only sold 5000 cars which didn’t amount to much compared to the new car market in that area of the world the cut back will be making 300 people redundant and closing 52 dealerships.

Ford released that its imported cars simply didn’t compete with the existing and well selling local brands in Japan, a Ford spokesman said that there was no:

“reasonable path to profitability”

The existing Ford dealer locations in Japan and Indonesia will remain open into next year, then following that they will be sold over to a third party. The car manufactures website this week stated:

Today we have announced a difficult business decision to withdraw from all our operations in Indonesia in the second half of this year. This includes closing Ford dealerships and stopping the official sale and import of all Ford vehicles.”

This move is interesting for Ford as US car maker GM as also recently pulled out of Indonesia, it also makes absolute sense as Ford only has 0.1% of the car market in Japan and just 0.6% in Indonesia. The sales numbers aren’t huge either, in 2015 Ford sold 6,100 cars and trucks in Indonesia and 5,000 in Japan.

Tags: