Chery Automobile says it will open a new design centre near Frankfurt at the city of Raunheim am Main. The newly founded Chery Europe GmbH will commence work there in January 2019.
“We are thus creating the basis for our market entry in Europe,” says Jochen Tueting who is tasked with building the company’s R&D centre at Raunheim. Hiring has started and Chery says the aim is to employ around 30 to 50 people in an initial phase by the end of 2019.
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“We at Chery are aware that a serious and globally active automobile manufacturer must be present in the most important markets,” says Chery Chairman Tongyue Yin. “At last year’s IAA, we presented ourselves as a brand, now we’re going to execute our plans in and for Europe. We will therefore be launching models from our high-end brand Exeed that will be competitive with the leading European manufacturers in terms of quality, design and technology.”
The core areas of the Chery R&D centre in Raunheim are research & development, design and marketing & sales. The focus is to carefully prepare the market launch of Exeed models in European markets ‘sometime after 2020’.
“If Chery is to become a truly global brand, we have to go to Europe,” says Mr. Yin, making clear how important he considers the European car market to be in the Chinese car manufacturer’s efforts to match major global OEMs as soon as possible. Chery will focus on e-mobility, so a fully electric Exeed vehicle is “very likely” to become the first model to enter the European market.
Chery Auto says it is China’s leading exporter of vehicles. With a total of more than 1.5m units sold globally, more than 108,000 of them in 2017 alone. The company says it is responsible for about 30% of all Chinese vehicle exports. From January to August 2018, Chery says it has sold more than 462,000 vehicles, an increase of 13% over the same period last year (and it says 50,000 sales were in the fast growing electrified segment).
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By GlobalDataEuropean sales for Chery will be sourced from China. Chery is also partnered with Tata-owned Jaguar Land Rover for local production of JLR models for the Chinese market.
