France’s PSA Peugeot Citroen opens new car factory in China

SINGAPORE (ICIS)–PSA Peugeot Citroen on Wednesday opened a new car manufacturing plant in Chengdu, China, the French automaker said in a statement.

The Chinese yuan (CNY) 4bn factory will produce a total of 300,000 of multi-purpose vehicles and sport-utility vehicles (SUVs) a year, the company said.

It is the fourth assembly plant under Dongfeng Peugeot-Citroen Automobile Limited, an existing joint venture between PSA Peugeot Citroen and China-based automaker Dongfeng Motors.

The new plant is in line with the company’s target to sell 1m vehicles in China and southeast Asia in 2018, the group said.

The French group sees strong potential in the Chinese market, where car ownership currently stands at 75 vehicles per 1,000 inhabitants.

China recently overtook the US as having the world’s largest middle-class population, which represented 110m people at end-2015, and the figure is projected to  to double by 2022, it said.

The automotive industry is a major global consumer of petrochemicals which contributes more than a third of the raw material costs of an average vehicle. ICIS tracks the movement of petrochemical raw material costs in auto production both globally and regionally with the weighted ICIS Basket of Automotive Petrochemicals (IBAP).

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