On July 15, 2022, a delegation from Shandong Province visited Marquardt's automotive intelligent system manufacturing project as part of the "Five-Year Breakthrough" key project observation. In the production workshop, the assembly line of the 12-volt battery management system they produced for the customer Samsung Group of Korea was busy, and the monthly output of this product is now as high as 115,000 sets.
It is understood that the first phase of Marquardt's automotive intelligent system manufacturing project, with a total investment of 45 million euros and a construction area of 25,000 square meters, will commence construction in April 2018, with the first production line going into operation in April 2019 and 16 production lines reaching production in 2021, with sales revenue reaching RMB 450 million in that year.
General Manager of Marquardt Switchgear (Weihai) Co., Ltd, Bethold Arentz, told the New Yellow River reporter that the first phase of the project is expected to reach €75 million in revenue this year after a climb-up period, and that the Weihai plant is developing very efficiently and very quickly at the Marquardt Group. Just a few weeks ago, Marquardt won a major project to supply battery management systems to Audi Motor's new generation of electric vehicles, which will be put into production in Weihai, speeding up the implementation of the second phase of the Marquardt project.
As early as April 11 this year, Marquardt has signed an investment agreement with Weihai Lingang District for the second phase of the project, with a total construction area of 43,000 square metres, an initial investment of 40 million euros and a construction area of 23,000 square metres, which is expected to be installed and commissioned in August next year, and officially put into production on December 31 next year.
"During the construction of the second phase of the project, the entire first phase will reach full production capacity." Bethold Ahrendts said.
When asked why Marquardt chose Weihai as the site and pursued the investment consecutively, Bethold Arentz told the New Yellow River reporter that in 2014 the Marquardt Group planned to choose a site in Asia to build a new factory, and their first option for the site was that it must be produced in China, where they believed that China had the best market for electric vehicles, and that the main battlefield for the future of Marquardt's planned battery management system would be China, and that the main demand would also be in China .
As to why they chose Weihai, Bertold Arends believes that the location is very important for the overall operation of the company, as Marquardt itself has a factory in Shanghai, which is mainly oriented towards serving customers in the Yangtze River Delta and the south, while the new factory in Weihai can better serve customers in the northeast and north.
"More importantly, our main customers now are Samsung and Hyundai, and Weihai is very close to these customers, and the cargo ships all leave at night and arrive in the morning very efficiently. Weihai is very well located and it is very convenient to develop Japanese customers, including in the future." In addition to the geographical location, Weihai and the whole Shandong peninsula have very good advantages in terms of human resources, Weihai is also very liveable, people come and want to stay in the city, and the stability of the team is also a very central factor for the project, says Bertold Arends.
It is based on these factors that in 2017, after detailed research in 33 countries and regions, the Marquardt Group finally settled in Weihai for its second factory in China.
During its development, Marquardt's Weihai factory has developed many innovative initiatives to improve production efficiency. For example, the entire workshop adopts the industry's leading German Modan central material supply system, where the raw materials for injection moulding are handled in the warehouse material supply centre, and all supporting pipelines for the equipment are connected to each injection moulding machine through an underground corridor, making it much cleaner than the usual injection moulding workshop. This practice will be rolled out worldwide in the future.
Today, the second phase of Marquardt's Weihai plant is in full swing, and in the future the project will cover three main lines of new energy vehicle solutions, highly integrated intelligent systems and driving authorisation systems.
According to the plan, in October 2023, the plant will carry out the first batch of products for trial production and delivery of samples, with the aim of achieving mass production of products in 2024.
Source: Jinan Times, modified by WEIHAI.EU