National Electric Vehicle Sweden (NEVS) held its project launching ceremony for the production and Research&Development joint ventures in Tianjin Binhai Hi-tech zone, marking the start of NEVS strategic setup in China.
NEVS Tianjin factory will be focused on electric vehicles with an annual capacity of 200 000 units. NEVS will have two global production units with Trollhättan factory to support the Tianjin factory with manufacturing planning, workers training and product supply in the initial stage.
“China is the world’s fastest growing market for electrical vehicles, but also the most competitive. We are likely to see closures and consolidations going forward,” the company’s CEO Mattias Bergman told me. “But there’s a gap in the market that we can fill.”
NEVS recently announced two new strategic shareholders of NEVS from China with the city of Tianjin and State Research Information Technology, SRIT.
Now two Chinese joint ventures are registered, for Production and R&D. Besides NEVS the parties are SRIT and the It-company Teamsun, which investments initially will be 1 billion RMB (US$160 million) and 200 million RMB ((US$31.8 million). The three parties will combine their industrial and software engineering competence to co-develop future car connectivity systems.
At the same time the Bank of China granted NEVS a credit of 10 billion RMB (US$1.6 billion) to support the development of NEVS’ business in China.
There will be a close collaboration between the R&Ds in China and in Sweden to generate future vehicle technology and to develop tailor-made vehicle models for the Chinese consumers.
Based on the engineering expertise and experience in Sweden, the R&D in Tianjin is also designed to provide excellent engineering service to other Chinese brands that will create industrial synergies with NEVS’ own products.
The Tianjin city’s fast growing national level demonstration zone THT embraces a long history of automotive industry and has put great focus on green innovation. The cooperation with THT will give NEVS a strong foothold on the increasing EV market in China
