Mercedes-Benz opens new R&D center in Shanghai

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SHANGHAI — Germany’s Mercedes-Benz Group AG said Friday it has opened a research and development center (R&D) in Shanghai that will focus on mobility technology.

The center, the second R&D facility in China, will work in technical areas such as connectivity, automated driving and big data, the company said in a statement.

Mercedes-Benz has not disclosed the size of its investment in the new technical center, nor how many engineers it plans to eventually hire for the new site.

It said in the statement that it “aimed to attract hundreds of new tech talent”.

The establishment of a new technology center in Shanghai follows a step last year by the German automaker to significantly improve its R&D capabilities in Beijing by opening a new R&D facility in the Chinese capital.

With 1,000 engineers, the new technical facility in Beijing is more than three times the size of Mercedes-Benz’s that opened in 2014, and the first outside of Germany to be technically more “on par” with the much larger R&D headquarters of the company near Stuttgart, a said a person close to the center at the time.

(Reporting by Norihiko Shirouzu in Beijing and Brenda Goh in Shanghai; editing by Christopher Cushing and Kenneth Maxwell)

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