Chinese PVC window and door giant Dalian Shide Plastics Industry Co. Ltd. is spending up to 1 billion yuan ($149 million) on a factory complex in the northern city of Changchun, China, capable of producing 353 million pounds of profiles a year.
The company, based in Dalian, China, said the initial phase would be an investment of 750 million yuan ($112 million) with production of 265 million pounds of product. It said the whole project is scheduled for completion in March.
The factory would be the firm's eighth and give it production capacity of more than 2 billion pounds in China.
Dalian Shide officials declined to comment but Shide's website said the firm's sales in 2009 topped 10 billion yuan ($1.47 billion), a 30 percent increase from the previous year, as the company benefited from Chinese government policies to stimulate the country's construction and real estate sectors.
Shide claims to be the world's largest producer of sectional PVC building materials, and its parent, Dalian Shide Group, owns a professional soccer team in Dalian, and has investments in finance, insurance and hospitals.
The Changchun expansion comes on the heels of completing a new production base in Nanchang in February. The company said that was an investment of 500 million yuan ($73.5 million) with 42 production lines from Austria.
Shide also finished a factory in Luo He, China, in late 2009, another investment of 1 billion yuan ($149 million) with capacity of 353 million pounds.
Shide said that factory, with 61 production lines from Austrian suppliers, is the largest manufacturing base for chemical construction materials in central China.
The company first announced some of these big plans internationally in 1999, when Shide Chairman Xu Ming held a news conference in Washington along with several international suppliers.
Those suppliers included extruder maker Cincinnati Milacron Austria GmbH of Vienna, tooling supplier Greiner Extrusionstechnik of Wartberg, Austria, and compounder Reimelt GmbH of Rödermark, Germany.
The company also has previously signed orders for more than 200 extruders from Germany's Krauss-Maffei Kunststofftechnik GmbH.
In 2009, Forbes China magazine named Xu Ming as the 180th richest person in China, with an estimated worth of 3.89 billion yuan ($580 million). In 2005, he had ranked eighth on the Forbes list, with a net worth of more than $1 billion.