Spyker Cars, which owns cash-strapped Swedish automaker Saab, signed an agreement Tuesday with the small Chinese automaker Hawtai Motor Group to form a joint venture and provide $222 million to resume Saab production, as well as provide access to the Chinese market.
Hawtai will gain a 29.9 percent equity stake in Spyker in exchange for a $177.7 million portion of the funds, and the remainder will be provided as a convertible loan.
On Monday, Spyker announced that Saab had arranged a pair of loans to get the company's production lines running again. Nearly a month ago, Saab was forced to stop building new vehicles as it ran out of working capital to pay parts suppliers.
According to Autoweek magazine, Hawtai is a small, private SUV and bus maker established in 2000 in the eastern China city of Rongcheng and now located in Beijing. In 2002, it started building the Terracan and Santa Fe SUVs under its own brand, using technology licensed from Hyundai.
In 2010, Hawtai sold 81,439 units of the two SUV models, according to J. D. Power. The company started selling its own brand sedan last year. The automakwer has an annual production capacity of 350,000 vehicles, 300,000 clean-diesel engines and 450,000 automatic transmissions.
"This is a great day for our relatively young company which was founded ten years ago,” said Hawtai vice president of Richard Zhang. “The partnership with the iconic Saab brand will give us access to innovative technologies and an international network which would have taken us decades to build.”
Victor Muller, CEO of the Dutch automaker Spyker and chairman of Saab Automobile, said the new relationship with Hawtai will give access to the Chinese company’s clean-diesel technology and production facilities.
“The partnership with Hawtai allows Saab Automobile on the one hand to continue executing its business plan since we secured the required mid-term financing subject to meeting certain conditions, whilst on the other hand it allows Saab Automobile to enter the Chinese car market and establish a technology partnership with a strong Chinese manufacturer,” Muller said in a media release. -automotive.speedtv.com
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