Hyundai Exits Japan, Why Did It Stay So Long?

Hyundai, which has been very successful of late in the U.S., has decided to stop selling passenger cars in Japan. More accurately, Hyundai has stopped trying to sell cars in Japan: since 2001, it’s only managed to sell a little over...15,000 vehicles. That’s less than 200 cars a month, on average. I don’t know how many Hyundai dealerships there are in Japan, but with numbers like that, I hope not a lot.

The Japanese auto market, unlike the U.S. market, is mercilessly difficult to crack. And according to BusinessWeek, the Japanese market has been contracting since the 1990s, so it’s even tougher to crack than ever.

So what were the South Koreans doing there in the first place? Again, BizWeek points out that they couldn’t even get into the mini-car market, which makes up a significant portion of sales in Japan. So they were going up against Toyota, Honda, Missan, et al. not on price but with cars that had to compete more toe-to-toe. Not a fight they were likely to win.

But you have to hand it to Hyundai: 15,000 sales in eight years—it takes some fortitude to stick it out in the face of numbers like that.