Lincoln Easing Back With Chinese Dealer Expansion

On the back of a successful year of sales in 2016, Lincoln has confirmed that it will ease back with the growth of its dealership network in China.

In 2016, the automaker expanded its Chinese dealer network to 65 stores throughout dozens of local cities, a significant jump on the 30 locations it had operating at the end of 2015. However, while speaking with Autonews recently, Lincoln president Kumar Galhotra said the rate of new dealerships will slow.

“The growth in the network won’t be as aggressive. We’re being very prudent. We don’t want to end up overdealering certain cities, so we have a very specific plan, city by city, but we won’t be doubling the network this year,” he said.

Galhotra failed to specify how many dealerships the company expects to launch in 2017, but said that the brand has locations in most major cities and will now turn its attention to smaller urban areas.

As it stands, all of Lincoln’s models sold in China are imported from overseas, but the brand is open to creating a local production facility if demand grows high enough, says Galhotra.

“It just comes down to scale. At some point, if we have enough scale and it makes more sense to manufacture for China in China, we would consider it.”

In 2016, Lincoln sold 32,558 vehicles in China, triple what it sold in 2015.