Chinese real estate giant Evergrande plans to acquire full control of a leading new energy vehicle (NEV) maker in Sweden.
Evergrande announced on Thursday that it will purchase the remaining shares it doesn’t already hold in National Electric Vehicle Sweden AB (NEVS) to become full owner.
Evergrande first began to invest in NEVS over a year ago via its Mini Minor subsidiary, and has recently boosted its stake in the Scandinavian automaker to 82.4%.
Mini Minor will purchase the remaining 17.6% of equity in NEVS for around USD$380 million, which would value NEVS at almost $2.2 billion.
While Evergrande is known as a leading Chinese real estate developer it has also spent heavily on diversification into clean energy vehicles, with an outlay of 14.1 billion yuan in the second half of 2019 and plans to invest a further 6 billion yuan by the end of 2020.
NEVS was founded in 2012 via the acquisition of the main assets of Saab Automobile during the latter’s bankruptcy proceedings.
In December 2015 NEVS entered a strategic cooperative agreement with Chinese clean energy vehicle leasing company Panda New Energy, while in 2017 DiDI announced it would invest 4 billion SEK in NEVS.
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