BYD's Qinghai battery plant to start production in June -Xinhua
HONG KONG, Jan 30 (Reuters) - Chinese carmaker BYD Co Ltd expects to start production at its lithium battery plant in western Qinghai province in June, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Tuesday, citing a company executive.
The first three production lines at the plant, each with an annual capacity of 2 gigawatt hour (GWh), will all go live in June, Xinhua quoted BYD's vice president He Long as saying.
With an investment of 4 billion yuan ($633 million), the battery plant is designed to have an annual production capacity of 10 GWh, Xinhua said.
BYD, backed by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc , sealed a deal to partner with a local firm in Qinghai province to build a plant with an annual output of 30,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate, a raw material for making lithium batteries. ($1 = 6.3176 Chinese yuan renminbi) (Reporting by Meg Shen; Editing by Susan Fenton)