Opinions & Interviews

BORISOV DISTRICT, 17 November (BelTA) – It is necessary to set up a proprietary design engineering department at premises of the new car factory of the Belarusian-Chinese joint venture BelGee. Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko made the relevant statement as he addressed BelGee employees on 17 November, BelTA has learned.

Alexander Lukashenko said: “We should create a design engineering office of our own. Yes, we’ve got help from the specialists, who came here from Sweden and other countries. But we need specialists of our own. We need 10-13 people initially, who will get in touch with our design engineers from MAZ, BelAZ and will accumulate experience little by little so that we could design cars of our own from scratch.”

The Belarusian-Chinese joint venture SZAO BelGee was established in 2011 to make Geely brand cars. The company assembled the first car in February 2013.

The construction of the factory to assemble cars using completely knocked down kits began in late March 2015. The new factory is located between Borisov and Zhodino and occupies about 120ha. The factory is designed to make 60,000 cars per annum initially.

Plans have been made to use the full fabrication cycle to make Geely NL3 and NL4 crossovers and the Geely FE3 sedan.

In 2017 the new car factory is expected to make about 1,800 vehicles. More will be made and sold in 2018. In 2018 and 2019 the new car factory is supposed to make 25,000 cars and 35,000 cars respectively.