German companies sign contracts with Chinese partners

German companies signed a series of agreements with Chinese partners at a meeting of Chancellor Angela Merkel and Prime Minister Li Keqiang in Berlin on Monday, according to a document seen by Reuters. Following are details of them:

BASF

BASF signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with China’s Guangdong Province to look at building a highly-integrated chemical production site there, BASF said.

The site would be BASF’s largest investment and would be operated under its sole responsibility, it said. The investment is estimated to reach up to $10 billion by completion of the project around 2030, it added.

BMW

BMW and its joint venture partner Brilliance Automotive Group Holdings have agreed to expand production capacity at BMW Brilliance Automotive’s two sites in China to a total of 520,000 BMW brand vehicles in 2019, BMW said.

In addition, it said the two companies had agreed that the all-electric BMW iX3 would be exported from China to other markets.

Separately, BMW said it would source 4 billion euros’ ($4.7 billion) worth of battery cells from Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd (CATL) over the next few years.

About 1.5 billion euros’ worth of those cells will come from a new CATL plant in Erfurt, in the eastern German state of Thuringia.

BOSCH

Bosch and Chinese electric vehicle startup NIO agreed to cooperate on sensor technology, automated driving, electric motor controls and intelligent transport systems.

DAIMLER

Daimler and Tsinghua University have signed an agreement to extend their cooperation on sustainable transportation research in China by three years, Daimler said.

The Tsinghua Daimler Joint Research Center for Sustainable Transportation will sharpen its research efforts in the fields of automated driving and intelligent mobility, it said.

SIEMENS

Siemens and Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, signed an MoU to foster the industrial Internet of Things (IoT) in China, Siemens said.

Under the MoU, both companies will begin collaborating immediately and intend to make the MindSphere platform on Alibaba Cloud available in 2019, it said.

Separately, Siemens said it had signed an MoU with State Power Investment Corporation (SPIC) of China to confirm their intention to collaborate in the field of heavy-duty gas turbines.

VOLKSWAGEN

Volkswagen said its Spanish brand SEAT would return to the Chinese market in 2020/21 as part of an agreement with China’s Anhui Jianghuai Automobile Group (JAC) to develop electric vehicles.

VW, SEAT and JAC will jointly set up a new research and development centre in China to develop electric cars as well as technologies for connectivity and autonomous driving, it said.