FAW-Volkswagen's 3rd manufacturing base goes operational

FAW-Volkswagen's third manufacturing base went operational on Wednesday in south China's Foshan City, amid the Sino-German joint venture's expansion efforts.

An all-new Golf sedan was the first vehicle to roll off the assembly line at the branch company of FAW Volkswagen Co., Ltd. in Foshan, Guangdong Province.

"FAW-Volkswagen aims to produce and sell over 1.8 million vehicles by 2015," said Zhang Pijie, general manger of FAW-Volkswagen.

The Foshan company was set up on Dec. 1, 2011, after the project was launched in June the same year.

The one-million-square-meter plant, with an investment of more than 13 billion yuan (2.1 billion U.S. dollars), has an annual capacity of 300,000 units.

Along with its two other bases in Changchun of northeast China's Jilin Province and Chengdu of southwestern Sichuan Province, where the company has a capacity of 900,000 and 540,000 units respectively, FAW-Volkswagen has completed a strategic layout of its manufacturing bases across the country.

The second-phase project of the Foshan company will start soon, according to sources with FAW-Volkswagen.

Established in Changchun in 1991, FAW-Volkswagen has so far delivered more than 7 million vehicles, including models like Jetta, Bora, Sagitar, Golf, GTI, Magotan and CC.

In the first eight months of the year, FAW-Volkswagen delivered 996,272 vehicles, up 16.32 percent from the same period of last year, according to figures from the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers.