(Yicai) Dec. 8 -- The joint venture plant of Chinese power battery giant Gotion High-Tech in Thailand has officially kicked off production.

The Thai plant’s first lithium iron phosphate battery pack for electric vehicles rolled off the production line yesterday, the Volkswagen Group-backed company announced yesterday.

The first phase of the plant has an annual production capacity of 2 gigawatt-hours of power battery packs, which will be gradually raised to 8 GWh, depending on the market demand, said Sun Xiyi, chief executive of NV Gotion, Gotion High-Tech’s JV with Nuovo Plus, a unit of Thailand’s largest energy and petrochemical firm Petroleum Authority of Thailand.

The plant’s battery packs have a milage range of 400 kilometers on a single charge, which meets the demand of most A-class EVs in the Thai market, Hefei-based Gotion High-Tech noted.

The battery packs produced at the JV plant have great advantages in terms of performance and price in Thailand, said Yu Qiang, marketing director of NV Gotion. The bulk supply of the battery pack to Chinese EV startup Hozon Auto’s Thai plant will start next quarter, Yu noted.

Hozon Auto’s Thai plant, which has an annual capacity of 20,000 vehicles, came on stream at the end of last month and will start mass production in the first quarter of next year, according to Chinese media report last week.

Thailand had over 50,000 registered new energy vehicles in the first three quarters of the year, 7.6 times higher than a year earlier, showing that the market has huge growth potential.

The Thai JV plant is not Gotion High-Tech’s only one overseas. The company began operations at a power battery plant in Germany in September. In the same month, the firm announced it would invest USD2 billion to set up a plant in Illinois in the United States. In October, Gotion High-Tech also said it had signed an investment agreement with the government of Michigan in the US to build a power battery material factory there for USD2.4 billion.

Gotion High-Tech’s shares [SHE: 002074] closed down 1.19 percent at CNY22.50 (USD3.14) in Shenzhen today.

Editor: Futura Costaglione