Hyundai Motor seeks to sell Beijing No. 1 plant site: sources

 Hyundai Motor Co., South Korea’s biggest carmaker, is seeking to sell an idle plant site in China to a local district government, industry sources said Friday.

Hyundai Motor plans to sell the site of the No. 1 Beijing plant, which has been suspended since April 2019, to the Shunyi administrative district, a person familiar with the matter told Yonhap News Agency over the phone.

The plant’s suspension came after Hyundai suffered years of sluggish sales in China due to the lingering impact of political tensions between Seoul and Beijing over the deployment of an advanced U.S. missile defense system, THAAD, in South Korea in 2017.

Hyundai didn’t confirm the plant’s sale plan.

Hyundai’s four other plants in China — two in Beijing, one in Changzhou and one in Chongqing — are in operation.

Currently, Hyundai has seven domestic plants and 10 overseas plants — four in China except for the Beijing No. 1 plant and one each in the United States, the Czech Republic, Turkey, Russia, India and Brazil. Their combined capacity reaches 5.5 million vehicles.

To revive sales in the world’s biggest automobile market, Hyundai has stepped up its efforts to reorganize its sales networks and product lineup since 2019.

This year, Hyundai launched its independent Genesis brand in the neighboring market, while planning to launch electrified models such as the Hyundai IONIQ 5 to gain a share in the local EV markets.