Beijing Hella BHAP Automotive Lighting, a joint venture between Hella and the BAIC subsidiary BHAP, has opened a new lighting plant in Changzhou in the Chinese province of Jiangsu.
The main focus of the plant is on innovative technologies for the vehicle front. On a production area of around 12,000 square metres, for example, a continuous light strip over two metres long is manufactured there, which extends over the entire front of the vehicle. It consists of a single module, making the light strip the largest and most complex of its kind in the Chinese automotive market. The supplier is a Chinese manufacturer of electric vehicles. The annual production volume is initially around 600,000 parts. At present, about 150 people are employed in the new lighting plant; in further expansion stages, the number is to be increased to about 300 employees in the medium term.
“Emotional body lighting has long since become a style-defining element. Since such solutions contribute decisively to the unique position and recognition of car manufacturers, the demand for innovative body lighting is particularly high, not least in the Chinese market,” says Didier Keskas, who is responsible for the lighting business in the Asian region at Hella.
“The opening of our new lighting plant in Changzhou with our long-standing joint venture partner Hella is an important step for us and an essential measure to push the ambitious further development of BHAP and to further strengthen our market position in the field of electric mobility. With the lighting solutions that we are manufacturing in the new plant, we are not only occupying a central trend topic. At the same time, we are also strategically well located in the middle of a new, important cluster of the Chinese automotive industry,” says Chen Geng, Vice President of BHAP. “In this respect, we are pleased to celebrate the commissioning of the new production plant together with Hella and to further strengthen our position in our home market.”
The production facility is now the third plant of the joint venture, which was founded in 2014; both partners also maintain another joint venture for electronic products with a production site in Zhenjiang. The investment volume of the new site in Changzhou is in the low double-digit million euro range.
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