Borgward BX 7

[Geza]

Borgward is dead. Again

Borgward had a goal of selling 800,000 cars by 2020, but things didn't go according to its original plan. The company was revived in 2015 and in 2018 it started its sales in the European market, but since 2019 Foton Motor (subsidiary and truck division of BAIC) sold 67% of the shares it held in Borgward to the Chinese mobility company Ucar , for 614 million dollars, the company began to "take the bottom ride".

Coming to today, Borgward's action didn't last long, as the company filed for bankruptcy after failed rescue efforts, and is seeking court approval to liquidate its assets. The company reportedly owes creditors more than 5.33 billion yuan (€720 million), with ownership currently split between Foton and Ucar.

The bankruptcy, issued by Beijing's First Intermediate People's Court, ends long-term plans to reestablish Borgward, once Germany's third-largest automaker by volume, under Chinese ownership.

While Borgward was officially headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany, almost everything from engineering to production and even sales was done in China. Since its revival in 2015 and the unveiling of the BX7 , the company has added three more crossovers to its lineup, the BX3, BX5 and BX6 . In 2019, it released the electric version of the BX7, called the BXi7 , while the BX5 counterpart was planned, but it looks like the BXi5 will never go into production.


Besides the Chinese market, Borgward sold cars in a few other countries, including Malaysia and Nepal, and slowly expanded into Europe. By 2018, it announced plans to enter the Irish and UK markets. The peak of its sales was reached in 2019, with total sales of around 55,000 cars, to drop to 9,000 cars in 2020, due to the pandemic.

Since then, the company has never recovered, and for the last two years it has been "slow dying".