BEIJING, June 15 (Xinhua) -- "A great economic and industrial opportunity." This is how Maria Jesus Lorenzana, regional minister of economy and industry of Spain's Galicia, described a planned electric vehicle factory project by Chinese automaker SAIC Motor in the region, which could become the company's first such facility in Europe.
Hailed as one of the "most significant industrial investments Galicia has seen in decades," the project is expected to involve an initial investment of about 200 million euros (about 232 million U.S. dollars) and create over 2,300 jobs with an annual capacity of approximately 120,000 vehicles, local authorities announced earlier this month.
Beyond investment, officials see the project, which will also include an industrial zone for vehicle assembly and transportation, as a catalyst for broader industrial development. Lorenzana said it could help foster advanced manufacturing, expand local component supply and strengthen logistics capabilities in a region with a long automotive tradition.
Such optimism is not without precedent. In Barcelona, a partnership between Chinese automaker Chery and Spanish brand Ebro has brought a former Nissan plant in the Zona Franca industrial zone back to life, which sat idle for years after the Japanese auto manufacturer's 2021 exit left local workers waiting for reemployment opportunities.
Rather than erasing a local brand, the partnership is built around it. Chery brought its manufacturing expertise while Ebro retained its Spanish identity, with part of production carried out under the Ebro brand. The joint venture has employed at least 1,000 workers and has been rolling out new-energy vehicles tailored to the European market since 2024.
"Thanks to cooperation among institutions, unions, investors and Chery, we are giving life to a new generation of vehicles that blend historical legacy with innovation," said Rafael Ruiz, president of Ebro EV Motors.
These developments come amid recurring concern that the overseas expansion of Chinese companies could intensify competition in global markets. Industry experts, however, say Chinese companies are increasingly acting not only as investors and manufacturers, but also as partners in job creation, industrial upgrading and economic transformation.
By the end of 2025, China had more than 50,000 overseas enterprises operating across 190 countries and regions, according to the commerce ministry. In 2024 alone, overseas Chinese companies generated a combined revenue of 3.6 trillion U.S. dollars and paid 82.1 billion dollars in taxes to host economies, while employing 5.02 million people at year-end, of whom about two-thirds were local hires.
A structural shift is also underway: a survey report by the National Autonomous University of Mexico, for instance, revealed that the share of manufacturing in China's direct investment in Latin America and the Caribbean had risen sharply from 1.94 percent in 2000-2004 to 25.82 percent in 2020-2025.
Meanwhile, greenfield investments, which build new facilities and generate more jobs per transaction, have increased from less than a quarter of Chinese investment in the region during 2015-2019 to more than half in 2020-2025, reflecting a deeper and more productive engagement with host economies, the survey found.
Wei Jianguo, China's former vice minister of commerce, said outbound Chinese firms have moved beyond isolated factories and standalone projects toward industrial clusters, coordinated supply chains and localized operations.
Increasingly, a model combining "Chinese technology, global creation and local services" is gaining traction in host countries as companies deepen integration with local economies and development strategies, Wei noted.
In Thailand's Eastern Economic Corridor, an air-conditioner factory of Chinese home appliance giant Midea Group rolls out a finished unit every six seconds for markets across Southeast Asia, Europe and North America, with annual capacity exceeding five million units.
Such scale is made possible by a 5G-enabled production network, autonomous mobile robots and advanced digital management systems, which helped the facility earn recognition as a World Economic Forum-certified "lighthouse factory" in 2025, a designation for manufacturers that excel in deploying advanced technologies.
The factory has established partnerships with 691 local suppliers, and 97.8 percent of its workforce comes from Southeast Asia, according to Midea. It built an AI‑powered training system for local employees to tackle language barriers, and cut energy consumption per unit by 40.2 percent and carbon emissions by 68.3 percent via a solar microgrid.
"Through cooperation with Chinese companies, we have learned the application experience of 5G new technology," said Asnee Wipatawate, an executive at Thai mobile operator AIS, which helped build a dedicated 5G network for Midea, while expecting to apply this experience to help more Thai companies in their digital transformation process.
In the digital sphere, the role of Chinese companies is becoming more visible. In Kenya, a digital payment platform built with Chinese technology has reached around 70 percent of its adult population, promoting financial inclusion while helping small businesses and rural communities participate in the digital economy.
Chinese cloud and AI providers are also expanding their footprint, particularly in emerging markets, giving local businesses access to digital infrastructure that was previously out of reach. As of January, Alibaba's Qwen family of AI models had recorded 700 million downloads on the Hugging Face collaborative AI platform, making it the most popular open-source AI system worldwide.
China's expanding overseas corporate presence is likely to shape the next phase of globalization, said Wei, who expects the global trade and investment landscape to become more balanced and inclusive in the future.
"Chinese companies are evolving from participants to pacesetters, and from simply going abroad to becoming more deeply integrated into local economies," he said. "In doing so, they are writing a new chapter in their globalization journey." ■
