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By Yilei Sun and Brenda Goh
SHANGHAI – Chinese carmaker Geely plans to use a platform developed with Volvo’s involvement to build new models in Malaysia for its Proton brand, partly owned, a strategy that shows how it intends to drive its efforts towards the world’s leading automotive giant in China.
Plans that have not yet been finalized for Proton are just one component of a Geely assignment to reorganize the joint domestic and foreign plant platforms it has been refining with Volvo since 2013. Geely bought the Swedish logo 10 years ago, as part of an agreement that raised his foreign profile and sent shock waves across the global automotive industry.
Geely’s senior officials and engineers told Reuters that an assignment called Compact Modular Architecture (CMA) would allow them to develop, design and build other types of compact cars with a faster mechanical design than before and at a lower cost.
They claimed that CMA, as well as a small car platform known as the modular B-segment architecture (BMA) that Geely plans to implement for Proton, allowed them to take advantage of Swedish automaker technologies and Geely’s functions in load control, chain control and production.
“CMA will be at the center of Geely’s long-term architecture design matrix. We are learning technologies and improving skill through them,” said Li Li, vice president of Geely’s Automobile Research Institute, confirming Proton’s plan in an interview in Ningbo, south of Shanghai. Li declined to disclose general investment details, monetary objectives, or a schedule for expansion plans.
Since its modest founding in 1986 in Taizhou, on the East Coast, as a manufacturer of refrigerator parts, Geely has one of the leading players in China, the world’s largest automotive market, representing approximately one in three passenger cars sold worldwide. Geely now sells more than 2 million cars a year across all brands, calling it nearly the 10 most sensible car brands in the world in terms of sales units.
The specific CMA platform will allow Geely and Volvo to design cars faster and at a lower cost, Li said, providing a technological springboard to a higher percentage of the market at a time when the automotive industry will have to adopt a long term with electrical and autonomous systems. Transport.
Global ambitions
Like Geely, an anglicization of the Chinese word for ‘lucky’, the national pairs Great Wall Motor and GAC have diversified with their own versions of vehicle platforms, fostering greater ambitions to sell in major Western markets.
But primary projects have already been delayed or canceled due to a lack of practical readiness, analysts said, amid years of china-U.S. industrial tensions that have rocked the global economy. At the same time, attention has been diverted to cope with the slowdown in domestic sales as China’s expansion has slowed.
In his quest for automaker status, Hangzhou-based Geely is in talks lately to merge Volvo Cars’ Business with Hong Kong-listed Geely Automobile.
In addition to the 49.9% stake it acquired in Proton 3 years ago, Geely’s largest group, led by Taizhou-born billionaire Li Shufu, now includes a 9.7% stake in Germany’s Daimler AG and a majority stake in the British Lotus sports car logo.
And while Toyota’s giants to Volkswagen and General Motors have followed shared platform projects for their respective brands, Geely’s strategy is the first for a Chinese company.
The automaker plans to expand all of its long-term models for the Geely and Lynk-Co brands on CMA or other similar product platforms, such as BMA. A new architecture is also emerging to drive the launch of natural battery electric cars with intelligent connectivity features, said Li, a former Ford engineer.
In addition, Geely needs to move the progression of the next generations of some existing popular models, such as the Borui and Emgrand sedans, to those architectures, he said. Geely takes 18 months to replace a particular CMA-based car, and 24 to 30 months to do so in a non-CMA-based model.
With CMA, plant managers can replace production of other models to flow overall capacity usage rates on production lines, said Oskar Falk, Volvo’s trained manager at Geely and Volvo’s first joint production site in Taizhou.
The plant is already exporting Volvo Polestar 2 electric sedans to the United States and Europe, and will manufacture Volvo’s first battery electric vehicle, Falk said.
Geely also plans to start exporting Chinese-made Lynk-Co 01 SUVs to Europe this year.
Reuters
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