Infiniti had moved to Hong Kong in 2012 in order to better break into the Chinese market, however, Chinese market growth has been slow for the brand over the last seven years. Sales are less than 1/10th what Cadillac sells in China. While the headquarters for the brand resided in Hong Kong, most of the development work on the vehicles themselves remained in Japan.
Now, Infiniti is consolidating back to Japan in order to regain efficiencies of working closer to home. Infiniti is working on becoming an EV focused brand by 2021 with every future model featuring some level of electrification or being a pure EV. One other area that will also see consolidation is platforms. Infiniti will use more Nissan platforms in future in order to spread the development costs over more vehicles.
The current Hong Kong headquarters employes about 180 people. Most of those will be relocating Yokohama or receive some sort of severance.
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