General Motors Co will pull the Opel from China next year as part of a plan to focus the brand on the European market.

Opel, which has been in China since 1993, failed to expand beyond a low-volume, niche player in the country, accounting for less than 1 percent of GM's sales in the market last year. Opel's 22 Chinese dealers sold 4,365 vehicles in 2013.

"This is a long overdue decision," Karl-Thomas Neumann, Opel's chief, said in a statement. "It would have cost hundreds of millions of euros to raise awareness of the Opel brand and to expand the distribution network."