Immediately after taking the helm of Mazda Motor, newly appointed President Masahiro Moro, who took office on June 27 in the first leadership change in five years, flew to China.
“We are finally going to start full-scale operations here," he wrote in an email sent to people involved, determined to turn around sluggish China sales as his first mission as president.
Mazda’s sales in China in the year from April 2022 had halved from the previous year to 84,000 units. The main reason was a thin lineup of electric vehicles popular in China, with the CX-30, launched in the autumn of 2021, being the only EV model for the Chinese market. While other companies launched new models one after another, Mazda sold only about 200 units of the CX-30 in fiscal 2022, which ended in March this year.