By Zhang Yan
ABU DHABI (Reuters) -FAW Trucks, China’s largest truck maker by sales, believes it will be able to eventually sell more than 10,000 trucks a year in the Middle East and is seeking local partners to reach that goal, its chairman said on Wednesday.
Li Sheng, chairman of FAW Trucks, said as part of this effort to more aggressively court the market, they were speeding up the construction of an assembly plant in Saudi Arabia, which had started a trial project on electric trucks.
He did not give a timeline for when they believed they could reach such a scale. The unit, which also makes other types of vehicles such as tractors, sold 214,000 medium and heavy trucks last year. It exported 57,000 vehicles but did not disclose how many were trucks.
“We see an accelerated trend of deploying new technologies in the logistics sector in the region,” he told Reuters on the sidelines of the World New Energy Vehicle Congress in Abu Dhabi.
“So we are seeking local partners and introducing high-end products.”
Southeast Asia, Central Asia, Latin America were also target overseas markets, Li added, citing Brazil in particular, as FAW Trucks eventually aims to sell 500,000 vehicles annually with 36% of those going abroad.
FAW Trucks, whose Chinese name is FAW Jiefang, is a unit of Changchun-based FAW. FAW also owns other car brands such as Hongqi, or Red Flag, known to be former state leader Chairman Mao Zedong’s favourite car brand.
(Reporting by Zhang Yan; Editing by Brenda Goh and Christian Schmollinger)
