French carmaker PSA Peugeot Citroën is on track to build a new China car plant with Dongfeng Motor Group and is looking to export from China as early as 2011, its Asia chief said on September 4th.

PSA Peugeot, a long-time partner of Dongfeng Motor, has been speeding up expansion in the world's biggest auto market, where General Motors and Volkswagen lead.

It signed a deal to set up a vehicle venture with China Chang'an Automotive Group in July and will start the construction of its third car facility with Dongfeng at the end of the year. The move would give PSA a combined annual capacity of 400,000 units.

"The plants are for the Chinese market. Only gradually will the export start," Gregoire Olivier told a small group of reporters in the northern municipality of Tianjin. "We are preparing a logistic platform in Shanghai to export in Asia starting 2011, but this will be small volume."

In China, now PSA Peugeot's second-largest market, Olivier said he expected its Dongfeng venture to sell 350,000 cars this year, up 28.7 percent from a year earlier.

Eventually, the French company wants to have 8 percent of China's auto market, up from 3.3 percent now, he added. To help get there, Olivier said he had proposed to nearly triple the number of engineers at its start-of-the-art R&D centre in Shanghai to 1,000 from 350.

China, which overtook the United States as the world's largest auto market last year, has been a major bright spot as the global industry struggles to recover from a steep downturn.

Other foreign automakers are also adding new capacity in China, betting on sustainable longer-term growth of the market where per capita car ownership remains low.