The plant is located in Changsha in the province of Hunan, south-central China and is being built in cooperation with VW’s Chinese joint venture Shanghai-Volkswagen (SVW).

The factory is scheduled for completion by the end of 2015 and will manufacture around 300,000 vehicles per year.

‘We are expanding our capacity in China to four million vehicles per year by 2018 in order to meet demand from our Chinese customers,’ said Prof Dr Jochem Heizmann, president and CEO of Volkswagen Group China, at the contract signing ceremony and groundbreaking in Changsha.

The plant will feature a complete production facility with press shop, body shop, paint shop and final assembly and is focused on resource-efficient production. Priority is being given to reducing energy and water consumption as well as CO2and solvent emissions, and to cutting back waste volumes in line with the “Think Blue. Factory.” programme.

The Changsha plant is part of a €9.8bn investment programme covering VW’s two Chinese joint ventures – Shanghai-Volkswagen and FAW-Volkswagen – in the period to 2015. The investments focus on developing new models and expanding production capacity. The Changsha factory is one of seven new plants to be built in China this year and over the coming years.

Shanghai-Volkswagen currently operates vehicle plants in Shanghai and Nanjing as well as Yizheng in the province of Jiangsu. Further factories are being built in Ningbo and in Urumqi under the “Go West” strategy.

FAW-Volkswagen operates vehicle plants in Changchun and Chengdu. The factory in Foshan, which is currently under construction, will be FAW-Volkswagen’s first plant in Southern China.

Together with its partners FAW-Volkswagen and Shanghai-Volkswagen, the Volkswagen Group currently builds 20 models of the Volkswagen, Skoda and Audi brands in China.