The Chinese car manufacturer Geely yesterday sealed a deal to buy the giant Volvo Cars Unit from American car manufacturer Ford Motor Co. for $1.8 billion, announced the official Chinese news agency.
"I can confirm that the final settlement was signed at 14.40 of the sale of Volvo to Geely," told the spokesman for Volvo, Per-Aake Froeberg to the France Press news agency.
Ford and Zhejiang Geely Holding Group signed the agreement at the headquarters of the Swedish brand in Gothenburg, added the “New China”, official Chinese news agency.
The U.S. car company had announced in December it had reached an agreement on the main conditions with Geely, to sell Volvo to the Chinese company, for about two billion dollars, according to the newspaper Financial Times.
Ford Motor Co. bought Volvo in 1999 for 6.4 billion dollars representing a coup for the Chinese automaker, one of the largest private manufacturers of China which is aiming to expand in Europe.
The union workers at Volvo, which account for 22 thousand people eventually approved the deal on Saturday, but were initially against the take over, on the basis of what they considered very vague expansion plans and possible redundancies.
According to Per-Aake Froeberg, the financial director of Ford, Lewis Booth and the chairman of Geely, Li Shufu, signed the agreement today to sell the main Swedish car manufacturer. Geely aims to produce 600 thousand vehicles by 2015.
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