The Chinese government gave a clean chit to the Joint Venture (JV) partnership between Tata Motors' subsidiary Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) and the state-owned Chery Automobile on October 29, 2012. Evidently, it took seven months for the regulatory approval to come from the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), after the JV alliance was announced by Tata Motors and Chery Automobile in March 2012.
Confirming the news, a JLR spokesperson said, "We can confirm that the JLR and Chery Automobile Company JV application has been cleared by the NDRC. We will hold a press conference on this in due course and provide more information at this point." The high profile JV will establish a new state-of-the-art Research and Development (R&D) facility along with a world-class production unit in the eastern city of Changshu in Jiangsu state.
The JV between JLR and Chery Automobile is said to be worth of 12 billion Yuan ($ 1.89 billion) and the process required almost half of the usual duration that takes place in China. The venture is anticipated to be turning operational somewhere around 2013-14 fiscal and will yield 130,000 vehicles annually. Most of the produced vehicles will be under Land Rover and Jaguar namesake along with few co-branded ones.
As per the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, the cumulative sales figures of JLR vehicles have exceeded 53,000 units in Chinese market between months January to September in 2012. this was an 80 per cent rise over sales figures during the same period last year. JLR's owner, Tata Motors sees better prospects in the future and has plans to increase the investments in its subsidiary considerably.
