Transmission specialist Antonov has signed an agreement with Chong Qing Landai Industries for a joint venture to develop the TX-6 automatic transmission for start of production, planned to begin in 2011.
Go deeper with GlobalData
Discover B2B Marketing That Performs
Combine business intelligence and editorial excellence to reach engaged professionals across 36 leading media platforms.
The six-speed gearbox will be manufactured in the joint venture facilities at Landai’s new site in Chong Qing, with capacity for at least 200,000 transmissions per year.
Using that site will reduce the level of investment originally anticipated so additional funding will be available to focus on accelerating the development programme to achieve production at the earliest possible date, Antonov said.
Each party will hold half of the shares in the joint venture, which will require each to invest RMB150m (around EUR15m. The registered capital of the joint venture will be RMB50m (around EUR5m), of which each party will contribute its RMB25m share in cash. This funding will be brought into the company as soon as it is legally established, which is expected to occur in the next few weeks.
The joint venture follows Antonov’s recent signing of a cooperation agreement with Chong Qing Landai Industries and Lifan Industry Group, which brings Lifan into the engineering programme to bring the TX-6 into production. The first step will be to build a prototype gearbox into two Lifan 620 cars, which is expected to take about six months.
