Companies
Metropolis extends global auto industry reach
New Volvo cars roll off the company’s production line in Chengdu.[Photo provided to China Daily]
Chengdu is drawing a growing number of large investment projects with its solid industrial foundation.
Work began this month on a car production plant based on Volvo’s scalable product architecture, a fullsize unibody automobile platform, in the city’s Longquanyi district.
The project, a joint undertaking of the Chengdu city government and Zhejiang Geely Holding Group — which owns Sweden’s Volvo Car Group — will cost 11.2 billion yuan (1.33 billion pounds) and is designed to be able to produce 200,000 vehicles a year.
The two parties have also signed another two car production project agreements.
One project will use the latest modular architecture platform BMA developed by Geely and Volvo to produce vehicles and will also deal with advanced hybrid and plug-in hybrid power systems. It cost 10.5 billion yuan and is expected to be able to produce 300,000 vehicles a year.
The other project will produce high-performance purely electric vehicles under the Volvo brand, as well as locally-branded, purely electric vehicles based on European technology. It will be able to produce 100,000 cars a year.
Geely started its investment in Chengdu by setting up a manufacturing base in 2007. The company purchased Volvo in 2010 and later built the first Volvo manufacturing plant on the Chinese mainland in Chengdu.
Volvo’s new luxury sedan, the S60 Inscription, has been manufactured in the Chengdu plant and exported to the United States since September 2015.
Li Donghui, executive vice-president of Geely, said he expects the Chengdu base to have annual output reach 100 billion yuan after all the projects are put into operation.
“We will build the Chengdu base into one of our most important strategic centers for new energy vehicles to serve the markets along the Belt and Road,” he said. The Belt and Road refers to the Silk Road Economic…
China
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