Hyundai Motor will break the ground for the fourth and fifth Chinese auto assembly plants in Chongqing and Cangzhou (Hebei Province) at the same time. According to the company and the Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Energy on August 17, the Korean car maker has decided the annual capacity for the two plants at 300,000 and 200,000 units, respectively. The Chongqing has already been completed with the ground work while the Cangzhou plant will retrofit a existing Beijing Automotive Group plant.

 

 

 

The two plants in Chongqing and Cangzhou will be completed by the second half and the first half of 2016 respectively. The company plans to expand the factories to 450,000 and 300,000 units in the future. A Hyundai Motor official said, "Given the fourth plant's completion was delayed, we decided to build the fifth plant concurrently in response to the rising market demand."

 

Once the two plants are up and running, the auto maker will have a total of 1.71 million capacity, including 1.05 million units in Beijing Hyundai and 160,000 in Sichuan Hyundai. The company has worked hard to establish production bases in the western inland region. Beijing Hyundai's all three plants are located near Beijing, with all three Dongfeng Yueda Kia plants clustered in Yancheng, Jiangsu Province. Chongqing is one of the five national central cities including Beijing-Tianjin, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong. The city's automobile penetration rate is 54 per 100,000 residents, comparing to Beijing's 239 cars per every 100,000 citizens.