BEIJING: German car maker Volkswagen will invest five billion yuan (730 million dollars) in a plant in southwest China along with its local partner FAW, state media said Friday.

The auto plant, to be built in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, is expected to create 4,500 jobs and will have an annual output of 150,000 vehicles, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

Volkswagen already has one joint venture with FAW, one of the big five auto manufacturers in China.

The chief executive of Volkswagen China, Winfried Vahland, was quoted as saying that the plant would be an important production base to achieve its target of sales of two million units a year in China by 2018.

Volkswagen and its two Chinese joint ventures, FAW Volkswagen and Shanghai Volkswagen, sold 1.02 million vehicles in the country in 2008, up 12.5 percent from the previous year.