Chinese car manufacturer Nanjing Auto has been handed a six-month lifeline to aid its attempt to restart car production at MG Rover’s mothballed Longbridge site, according to the Daily Telegraph newspaper.
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Nanjing, which snapped up the remains of MG Rover for £53m last year, has been offered a reprieve by the Midlands-based property firm that owns the 450 acres that make up the south Birmingham site, the report says.
St Modwen Properties has offered Nanjing the short lifeline to allow the Chinese firm to finalise its plans.
Long-term discussions between Nanjing and St Modwen have centred on agreeing terms for a 30-year lease on just 105 acres of the site. But those talks cannot be completed because Nanjing has yet to either complete its plans for car production or finalise its financial backers.
St Modwen’s chief executive, Bill Oliver, told the Telegraph: “The latest discussion we had was that they need another six-month period to get their business plans sorted out and that they can’t commit within that period. Hopefully that’s what we’ll be able to announce within the next week or so.”
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By GlobalDataUnder the current lease for the site – agreed with MG Rover’s administrator Price Waterhouse Coopers – the Chinese firm must leave by February 22. Nanjing was recently reminded of this in a letter from PWC, which was also copied to St Modwen.
Sources close to Nanjing last night told the Telegraph that the Chinese firm had enjoyed “detailed and fruitful” negotiations with St Modwen, and remained committed to building cars at Longbridge.
If all goes to plan, Nanjing hopes to eventually be producing as many as 50,000 cars a year at the Midlands site, and around a further 200,000 a year back home in China.
It will first focus on the MG TF sports car, and then on remodelled versions of the MG ZT saloon. But Nanjing has spent much of the past six months ‘lifting and shifting’ plant equipment to transport it to China and many observers in the industry remain sceptical about the manufacturer’s Longbridge plans.
