Volkswagen plans a new green-field plant in China

Leading German car manufacturer Volkswagen AG, announced on Wednesday that it has plans of establishing a green-field plant in South China. The plant will be built with an annual production capacity of 300,000 units. The company will start the construction of this plant by the end of 2010, at Foshan, in Guangdong province.

The Foshan plant will be ready for production by mid-2013 and will account for a heavy chunk of Volkswagen's planned investment of about $7.2 billion in China by year 2012. It will be the first plant from this joint venture in South China where the Japanese car giants Toyota and
Honda are already present in a high number.

The Volkswagen group also has a tie-up with SAIC Motor Corp, a leading domestic car-maker in the country. In the period of Jan to May 2010, the Volkswagen group has managed to sell 778,000 vehicles in China and reported a jump of 48 per cent over the sales in the same period in the previous year.The European mammoth aims to increase its capacity in China to 3 million units by 2013 to 2014.

The Chinese auto-market emerged as the fastest growing and largest auto-market last year, replacing US from the top spot of global automobile market.