The decision of the same was communicated to close to a dozen employees on Friday by the senior Chinese executives, said people in the know.
The company has extended a three months’ severance package to these employees, across functions of marketing, network, planning and strategy, service, HR & Finance, quality and production and R&D, added people in the know.
At the beginning of 2020, Great Wall Motor had entered into a term sheet agreement to acquire General Motors Talegaon Pune plant. The company even participated in the Auto Expo of 2020.
Great Wall Motor will join the likes of Changan, Haima and Chery that had serious plans of entering India, but couldn’t scale the great wall of regulations amid geopolitical changes in the continent.
An email sent to Great Wall Motor did not elicit any response till the time of publishing.
Having extended the term sheet twice and the $1-billion Great Wall Motor proposal stuck in federal clearance for more than two years, the US car maker was compelled to look at alternatives for the plant’s sale.
To be sure, Great Wall Motor has been exploring its India entry for close to a decade. It had made attempts to enter the market around 2014-2015, followed by 2017 and it finally signed a term sheet with GM to take over its Talegaon plant in 2020.
With the term sheet expiring, the FDI proposal submitted with the government stood void, since both GM and Great Wall Motor were party to the proposal. If at all GWM intended to carry on with its India plans, it would have had to present a fresh proposal to the government of India.
To be sure, over the last two years, the maker of Haval SUV did explore potential alternatives of assembling vehicles in a CKD form and even the completely built imports, but the plan did not translate into real action.
Interestingly, India was seen as a key frontier in Great Wall Motor’s international expansion along with Thailand and Brazil. While the operations in South East Asia and Latin American countries have kicked off, the Indian proposal has been stuck.
Over time, the key executives
plans were diverted to global markets and the team hired locally has almost halved, with key executives in the critical role of business development, sales and marketing, and strategy moving on to other automotive companies.
Great Wall Motor has been exploring its India entry for close to a decade. It had made attempts to enter the market around 2014-2015, followed by 2017 and it finally signed a term sheet with GM to take over its Talegaon plant in 2020.
