Venezuela signed several agreements Friday with Chinese manufacturer Haier to construct an industrial complex and sell household appliances in the South American country.
"We are going to install a domestic appliance factory here that will be in the interest of both Venezuela and China," President Hugo Chavez, a close ally of Beijing, said during the signing ceremony.
Haier will export about 300,000 Chinese-made appliances to Venezuela, and later install an industrial complex to make refrigerators and other domestic appliances in partnership with a publicly owned Venezuelan consortium.
In April, the Chinese government announced that it was extending a 20 billion dollar (16 billion euro) line of credit to Venezuela to finance long-term projects in agriculture, energy, industry and infrastructure.
The two countries have already established a 12 billion dollar binational fund to invest in projects in a variety of sectors, including housing, defense and infrastructure.
In the energy sector, the state-owned China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC) also plans to invest 16 billion dollars to develop a bloc in the vast and largely untapped Orinoco Heavy Oil Basin with its Venezuelan counterpart, PDVSA.
Venezuela, the world's ninth-largest crude oil producer, exports 460,000 barrels of oil a day to China, and has a medium-range goal of boosting the trade to more than a million barrels a day.
Trade between the two countries rose from 742 million dollars in 2003 to 10 billion dollars at the end of 2008, according to the Venezuelan government.
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