Volkswagen’s joint venture with Shanghai Automotive has broken ground for a 300,000-unit plant in Changsha in the province of Hunan, south-central China.
“We are expanding our capacity in China to 4m vehicles per year by 2018 in order to meet demand from our Chinese customers”, VW China chief Jochem Heizmann said at the contract signing and ground breaking ceremony.
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The plant is scheduled for completion at the end of 2015. It will be a complete production factory with press, body and paint shops plus final assembly.
Priority is being given to reducing energy and water consumption as well as CO2 and solvent emissions, and to cut back waste volumes in line with VW’s ‘Think Blue. Factory.’ programme.
Heizmann claimed: “We will meet our environmental responsibility in Changsha and set another milestone in resource-efficient production with the new factory.”
The plant is part of the EUR9.8bn investment program by VW’s two Chinese joint ventures [the other is with First Auto Works/FAW] to 2015.
The aim of the investment projects financed from the cash flow of the two joint ventures Shanghai-Volkswagen and FAW-Volkswagen is to consolidate the VW group’s leading position in Chinese passenger cars. The investments focus on developing new models and expanding production capacity.
Changsha is one of seven new plants to be built in China from this year.
Shanghai-Volkswagen currently operates vehicle plants in Shanghai and Nanjing as well as Yizheng in the province of Jiangsu. Further factories are being built in Ningbo and in Urumqi under the ‘Go West’ strategy.
FAW-Volkswagen operates vehicle plants in Changchun and Chengdu. The factory in Foshan, currently under construction, will be FAW-VW’s first plant in southern China.
Group JVs currently builds 20 VW, Škoda and Audi models in China.
