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Infiniti, a high-end brand owned by Japan's Nissan, has announced that it will move its headquarters from Hong Kong to Yokohama in mid-2020. Infiniti claimed to be sharing platforms and technologies with Nissan to save operating costs, improve efficiency and prepare for electrified transformation. Previously, most of Infiniti's research and development and product design work has indeed been in Japan, but this time the headquarters was moved back to Japan, mainly because of the poor performance of the Infiniti market and the sharp decline in profits of the parent company Nissan.

No matter how Infiniti calls itself, the data are the most intuitive reflection: Infiniti sold 47215 vehicles in China in 2018, down 2.4 per cent from a year earlier, a far cry from its previous annual sales target of 100000. Since it was made in 2014, its annual sales in China have failed to exceed 50,000 vehicles, and it has always been on the edge of luxury cars in China.

In 2015, the annual sales of high-end car brands such as Jaguar Land Rover, Lexus, Volvo and Cadillac in China have exceeded 100000, and the gap between high-end brand camps is widening day by day. At present, the annual sales of Lexus of high-end Japanese brands are close to 200000, almost five times that of Infiniti.

In 2012, Infiniti announced the official relocation of its global headquarters to Hong Kong. Before that, Infiniti settled the domestic base in Xiangyang. At that time, Infiniti said that the settlement of its global headquarters in Hong Kong marked that the Chinese market had become the center of Infiniti's global development, and had set an annual global sales target of 500000 vehicles.

However, what happened to Infiniti, who was frustrated to withdraw from the Chinese market seven years later? Infiniti, which was born in Japan and became in the United States, still sold more than 140000 cars in the United States last year. It is one of the best luxury cars in terms of styling and driving, but it shows a very different market performance in China, which is puzzling.

Infiniti entered the Chinese market in 2012. Infiniti has experienced seven years, but no matter how hard it is, it has not made a big leap. Looking into the reasons, the main reasons for Finidi's failure in China are single product line, weak product power, personnel turbulence, strategic wavering and so on.

In 2014 and 2015, Infiniti Q50L and QX50 were made in China successively, but since then, Infiniti has not introduced any domestic models, among which the domestic QX50 has not been replaced until recently.

Infiniti ranked 58th among all brands in 2018. Among them, the top two sales are Q50L and QX5O, with sales of 17930 and 9813 respectively. In other words, sales of two domestic models alone account for 60% of the total of 10 models sold in China.

At the same time, in terms of product quality, Infiniti issued three recalls and a total of about 29000 vehicles in just two years from 2016 to 2017, dealing a blow to trust in the brand.

Not only in terms of products, the frequent transfer of senior management staff has also brought a lot of negative impact to Infiniti. Since Dongfeng Infiniti and Dai Lei, former general manager of Infiniti China, left in 2016, a number of senior executives in the Chinese market have also left one after another. According to related reports, since Dai Lei's departure, the number of layoffs at Dongfeng Infiniti headquarters has dropped from nearly 300 to less than 240.

In January, Roland Krueger, who had been Infiniti's chief executive, abruptly announced his departure, and his successor, Steve Muck, quickly resigned four months later because of reasons such as unwillingness to stay in Hong Kong. There is no doubt that frequent high-level changes have made Infiniti, which is already a poor seller, even more depressed.

Infiniti restructured its global operations to save the brand. Infiniti announced on March 12 that it would withdraw from the European market in 2020, and the Sunderland plant in the UK would stop producing Q30 and QX30 models in mid-2019. In order to better achieve strategic synergy and reduce costs, the withdrawal of headquarters from Hong Kong, China to Japan is also part of Infiniti's restructuring plan.

In addition, Infiniti plans to electrify its products and stop providing diesel products from 2021. On CES ASIA in 2019, Nissan car R & D staff told our reporter that Nissan's latest high-tech will be imported from the Infiniti brand.

Some people in the industry lament that it is so difficult for Japanese car companies with strong technology to successfully build a luxury brand. China's independent brands have launched a number of positioning luxury and high-end brands, which means that China's high-end independent brands will be a protracted war based on ten or two decades.

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