Škoda will leave China as early as this year
Škoda will stop selling cars in China by the middle of this year, though Volkswagen Group is not pulling back from the market as a whole. What the group is doing is portfolio surgery, freeing up capital and development focus for the brands and platforms that still stand a chance of keeping pace in China’s electric car market.
Škoda told Reuters that it will continue selling cars in China with its regional partner until the middle of 2026, keep its aftersales operations in place and then shift into its next growth phase in India and South East Asia.
According to Reuters, Škoda’s sales in China fell to 15,000 cars in 2025, even though volumes topped 300,000 between 2016 and 2018. Škoda’s own 2025 sales figures tell much the same story. China accounted for 15,000 cars, India for 70,600 and the brand’s European core market for 836,200. China no longer provides the kind of scale that would justify maintaining a separate strategy for the marque.
The company finished 2025 with record revenue of €30.1 billion, operating profit of €2.5 billion and a return on sales of 8.3 per cent. Deliveries once again cleared the one million mark and Europe emerged clearly as the brand’s main profit centre. That makes walking away from China financially manageable and strategically hard to argue with.
As early as 2024, Škoda set itself the goal of selling 100,000 cars a year in India by 2026 and turning the region into a second pillar outside Europe. Management is therefore pulling resources out of a market where the brand lost relevance and putting them into one where it is still building scale.
The blunt truth is that Volkswagen no longer sees Škoda as the spearhead for taking on China’s breakneck technology cycle. Reuters describes how local players such as BYD and Geely pushed foreign brands onto the defensive, while Volkswagen itself is investing in China mainly through new locally developed VW and Audi solutions. Škoda’s value proposition, which worked well in Europe and once worked well in China too, no longer offers enough distinction in today’s Chinese electric car battle.
That is the real message here. Škoda is not so much leaving China as acknowledging that the old playbook stopped working some time ago.
