Opel, the European arm of US auto giant General Motors, announced Wednesday it will withdraw from the Russian market, where its sales are falling, and will close its factory in St. Petersburg.
"We've come to the assessment that the perspective for the Russian market isn't good, not only in the short term, but in the medium and long term as well," Opel chief executive Karl-Thomas Neumann told the business daily Handelsblatt. Opel subsequently issued a statement saying that the decision would result in a one-off charge of $600 million (566 million euros for parent GM in the first quarter of 2015.