FORD Motor Co. has scrapped a plan to create a unified national sales firm for China that stoked mistrust of the automaker at its joint venture partners and contributed to a spectacular collapse in sales in the world’s biggest car market.

On the face of it, the plan announced by Ford in June last year to combine sales channels for vehicles manufactured with Chongqing Changan Automobile Co. and Jiangling Motors Group made sense.

It would promote operational efficiency at its loss-making China operations and is standard practice in most other markets.

But it ignored realities on the ground. Chinese automakers, often in 50-50 partnerships with foreign carmakers, are reluctant to lose control over sales decisions, rarely willing to trust each other and loyal to local provinces that are fiercely competitive in their quest for economic growth and tax revenues from vehicle sales.

“I would say there was a lack of deep understanding on how relationships work in China,” said Anning Chen, who in October took over as Ford’s third China chief in two years.

It is the first time that Ford, grappling with a host of problems in China that present no quick fix, has disclosed the dropping of the plan — a decision also prompted by a slowdown in China’s economic growth amid the trade war with the United States as well as deeper losses at dealerships.

Many major foreign automakers have two or three partners in China, involving different marketing and distribution strategies for each partner. Ford is the only one known to have tried combining sales channels for mainstream cars.

(SD-Agencies)