JV plant

EVE Energy’s U.S. joint venture recently broke ground on its third power battery plant overseas, with the aim to supply its local partners with lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries.

Amplify Cell Technologies held the foundation-laying ceremony in Mississippi on June 28, Huizhou-based Eve announced. The plant is designed with an annual capacity of about 21-gigawatt hours, creating over 2,000 local jobs. Deliveries will start in 2026. Amplify’s three other backers — Cummins, Daimler Truck and America’s biggest truck maker Paccar — will be the main clients. Eve will invest up to US$150 million for a 10% stake, with the other investors owning 30% each.

Property market

PRE-OWNED home sales in three Chinese first-tier cities surged last month thanks to the relaxation of the cities’ housing policies.

Nearly 15,000 second-hand apartments were sold in Beijing in June, up 12% from May and 29% from a year earlier, the highest since March last year, according to data from the Beijing Municipal Commission of Housing and Urban-Rural Development. Some 26,374 second-hand homes were sold in Shanghai in June, up 41% from May, according to the Shanghai Real Estate Trading Center. Pre-owned home sales in Guangzhou soared more than 33% to 10,456 units between May 26 and June 25 from a month earlier, a new monthly record since April last year, according to statistics from the Guangzhou Association of Real Estate Agents.

New production base

CONSTRUCTION of Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis’ 600 million yuan (US$82.5 million) radiopharmaceutical manufacturing project in Haiyan County, East China’s Zhejiang Province, broke ground Tuesday.

Expected to be put into operation in 2026, the facility is also the firm’s first production base for its radioligand therapy, a cancer treatment drug using radioactive isotopes to deliver radiation directly to the tumor cells. Radioligand therapy drugs need to reach patients within a few days from production because of the very short half-life period of radioactive isotopes.