New Delhi: Dongfeng Honda Automobile on Friday announced that the company has started the operation of its third factory in the central Chinese city of Wuhan.
Built with an investment of about 3 billion RMB, the new factory is designed to accommodate production of electric cars to meet rising demand in the world’s largest new-energy vehicle market, where domestic and global automakers are vying to woo buyers with new-energy cars, the company said in a release.
Dongfeng Honda, which is joint venture between China’s Dongfeng Motor Corp. and Japan’s Honda Motor Co, further informed that the the new factory will initially be capable of producing 120,000 cars a year and its annual capacity will reach 240,000 in the future when needed.
According to Chinese new agency Xinhua, the company sold 720,000 vehicles in 2018, a 0.8-percent rise from a year earlier, compared with a 4.1-percent slump in the Chinese car market in the same period. The sales figure of the venture far overshot its annual capacity limits of 512,000 units at the two factories in Wuhan, which have been in production since 2004 and 2012.
Sales of Dongfeng Honda witnessed a year-on-year surge of 19.8 percent in the first quarter of 2019, thanks to a continuing popularity of the CR-V sports utility vehicle and the Civic sedan, according to the company.
Zheng Chunkai, executive vice manager of Dongfeng Honda, said though the overall market slowed in China, the decision to build this new factory was based on Chinese consumers’ trust in Honda cars and the factory would hopefully help his company achieve its sales target of 1 million cars a year.
(With inputs from Xinhua)
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