Gasgoo.com (Shanghai March 21) - Shanghai Volkswagen's new production site in Ningbo, Zhejiang will begin full operation next March, Economic Observer News reported today. This means that total construction work on the site, which was confirmed late last year, will take only 15 months to complete, the fastest a Chinese automobile factory of such a scale has been finished.

According to local media, Shanghai VW has invested a total of 11.76 billion yuan ($1.87b) in the new site, which is the joint venture's sixth so far. Work on the main factory building should be completed by this June, with equipment testing scheduled for this December. "From the time we began discussions to final approval, we spent only four months, [which] greatly helped shorten our work time," an official working in the project said in an interview last week.

Shanghai VW currently has five factories spread across Shanghai, Nanjing and Yizheng, Jiangsu. The three Shanghai factories and the Nanjing factory combined boast an annual production capacity of 1.1 million vehicles. The 9.1 billion yuan ($1.44b) Yizheng site, which has an expected capacity of 300,000 vehicles, will begin operation by the end of this year at the earliest. The JV's total production capacity is expected to exceed 1.75 million vehicles by 2015.
 

Source:gasgoo