OREANDA-NEWS. On August 28, 2014, Chery Brazil Plant was inaugurated in Jacarei, Sao Paulo. With a total investment of 400 million US dollars, as Chery's first overseas vehicle plant, this one is of great significance to Chery's development in Brazil and South America. To make this plant go into production optimally, Chery has made great efforts in all respects.

Brazil is one of the countries that value environmental protection most in the world. To make the plant up to international technical standards and accord with local environmental regulations, Chery has done a lot.

CO2 welding is a key production process of the plant's welding workshop. As great dust particles are produced in CO2 welding, ordinary welders will unavoidably pollute working environment in operation so as to affect operators' health. Thus, Chery has introduced advanced dust-removing equipment from US Nederman so that welding torches can absorb dust particles produced in welding directly via heads. This can not only effectively protect environment and workers' health, but also increase working efficiency.

The plant's painting workshop was designed and constructed as the most environmentally-friendly, efficient and energy-conserving of its kind. To make spray painting more flexible and efficient, the workshop uses DURR's EcoRP spray painting robot. Compared to traditional mechanical spray panting, EcoRP can not only reduce the number of spray guns by about 30 percent to 40 percent, but also boost the speed of spray painting. Besides, to be up to Brazil's environmental standards, Chery has also taken the lead in using the world's most advanced water paint technology in the workshop to minimize volatile organic compound emissions.

To the plant, production equipment and technology are Chery's hard strength and corporate culture is its soft strength. Now the plant has workers form countries including China and Brazil, Brazilian workers account for 70 percent and the figure will reach 90 percent in the future. Whether the plant can properly address the problem of cultural diversity between workers from different countries, especially between Chinese workers and Brazilian workers has become the key to Chery's smooth development in Brazil.

"We uphold the principle of seeking consensuses on major issues while reserving differences on minor ones, understand and respect Brazilian culture and customs, and gradually integrate Brazilian culture with Chinese culture, so as to form a common Brazilian corporate culture of Chery," said Peng Jian, general manager of Chery Brazil.

To make the workers fully feel Chery's corporate atmosphere of multi-culture integration, Chery often organizes the workers for football matches and irregularly carry out team building in the form of dinner party and travel. During the World Cup, Chery arranged a special vacation for the workers to watch the games. In such a good corporate culture, the plant's workers of different nationalities have not only cooperated more smoothly, but also become intimate friends in life.

In such a favorable atmosphere, many Brazilian workers have developed strong interest in Chinese culture, some have even applied to study in the local Confucius institute and begun to learn Chinese and Chinese culture; to improve the workers' comprehensive ability, Chery has also arranged a lot of newly-promoted Brazilian engineers for management and technology trainings at Chery's headquarters in Anhui, China.

Peng said, "In the future, the proportion of Brazilian workers will increase, elitists from round the world will also join the plant and penetrate into the management at all levels. Eventually Chery will be a real internationalized company."

As the new plant goes into production, Chery Brazil will create over 1,200 jobs for Jacarei. With the completion of Phase 2, Chery will bring in outstanding suppliers to form Chery Brazil Industry Park on the periphery of the plant and eventually create over 3,000 jobs. In the future, the plant will radiate the entire South American auto market as a major manufacturing base in South America to further drive local employment and economic development.

To date, Chery has conducted operations in markets such as Asia, Europe, Africa and Latin America, and established 14 manufacturing bases, over 1,100 distribution outlets and over 900 service stations outside China. The buildup of Chery Brazil Plant is not only a brilliant page in Chery's process of overseas localization, but also means that Chery has entered a new stage of internationalization.