Mazda and Ford had created a 3-party business cooperation with Chinese partner Chongqing Changan Automobile Co., an entity which will now be separated in two different ones, as the cited source writes.
According to Nikkei, the three companies are most likely to split the Nanjing Factory 50-50 between Mazda and Cahngan Automobile Group, while the venture’s other factory in Chongqing will be manged by Ford and Changan.
Apparently, one of the reasons for this is Mazda’s decision to make better use of the fact that China is now the world’s biggest automotive market, and the company’s decision to speed up its development on the market.
“It was sometimes difficult to coordinate production (in the three-way joint venture)," a senior Mazda official stated for the aforementioned source. However, Mazda’s joint-venture with Ford in the U.S. and Thailand will remain unaltered for now.
In 2009 Mazda had an estimated production figure of 70,000 units for the two Chinese factories mentioned above. The company intends to increase the capacity of the Nanjing plant to 200,000 units per year from the present 160,000, as Nikkei writes.
It would be interesting to see how much the changes in the business strategy (like this one) will cost automakers and, more importantly, how this costs will affect their future development plans.
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