In a reversal of fortunes for both the British and Chinese auto industries, the Nanjing Automobile Group Corp. (NAC), started to make Britain's famed little sports car the MG here in Nanjing on Tuesday.

NAC's new plant in Pukou area of Nanjing can produce 200,000 MG Rovers a year. The company won't say how many cars it will produce this year.Investment in the 300,000-square-meter factory will total 3.5 billion yuan (450 million U.S. dollars) over the next five years.

NAC bought the failed British carmaker MG Rover in July 2005 for 97 million U.S. dollars, outbidding Shanghai Automobile Industry Corp (SAIC), the biggest Chinese carmaker listed in Shanghai.

NAC will first make the MG7, a mid-scale sedan, and the MG TF sports car, which the company claims will be the first real sports car to be manufactured in China.

Construction of the new plant started last March. "It's amazing that in just one year's time, NAC has transferred equipment and facilities from the UK and has started producing cars," said Paul Stowe, NAC's quality director who has worked for MG Rover for 10 years.

China's automobile market is dominated by German and Japanese cars, as a pure English breed, MG Rover will appeal to Chinese new-riche's appetite and have a bright market future, Stowe said.

"The acquisition of UK MG Rover Group has put NAC on the shoulder of a giant. We are confident we'll be able to revive the valuable MG Rover brand," said Wang Haoliang, NAC's chairman.

Yu Jianwei, president of NAC, said MG Rover's bankruptcy was due to heavy debts rather than lack of product competitiveness. "MG Rover still has the most advanced technologies especially after BMW took it over and upgraded it in the middle 1990s."

"It is estimated that about 4 million MG Rover cars are in service around the world, which means even the auto parts alone will be a vast market," said Yu.

Since June last year, Nanjing has signed an agreement with the UK-based Xpart Ltd, an auto parts distributor and vehicle service company, and has exported four batches of car parts to Britain valued at more than 4 million U.S. dollars.

The move into auto parts will help MG Rover's after-sales service in Europe, as the supply of the firm's auto parts was disrupted after it went bankrupt.

NAC's Longbridge plant in Birmingham will resume production of MG-TF sports cars next month. It's annual production is expected to reach 50,000 units. The company is considering using the Birmingham plant as the assembly base for exports to elsewhere in Europe, Yu said.

NAC is recruiting MG Rover's former managers, technicians and experts in a bid to restore the company's profile.

The company also plans to build an automobile research and development industrial park in England. Yu hoped the industrial park will also attract other auto makers.

MG Rover, which has almost a 100-year history, collapsed on April 8, 2005 with debts of 1.4 billion pounds (1.7 billion U.S. dollars) and the loss of more than 5,000 jobs.

At its peak in the 1960s, the maker of Rover sedans and MG sports cars employed 250,000 people and Longbridge was one of the biggest factories in the world.

The company's MG Rover team in Nanjing now employees 1,200 people. Only one sixth of them are Chinese.

Tuesday also marks the 60th anniversary of the fourth largest Chinese car maker. It was founded in 1947 and has 16,000 employees and annual production capacity of about 200,000 vehicles, according to the company's Web site. The company also makes Fiat Palio and Siena cars.

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