General Motors has pulled out of the race to buy an ex-Daewoo car factory in Romania and is talking to Ford Motor and the Renault/Nissan alliance about buying engines built at the plant.

Nick Reilly, chief executive of GM Daewoo, the US carmaker’s South Korean division, said the company did not need to buy the Craiova factory, which has 3,600 staff. But his division needed the 60,000-70,000 engines it currently buys from the plant, and wanted to increase this to 100,000 a year.