Work on the factory, which is to manufacture base stations,
should begin this year, Huawei vice president and supervisory board member
Catherine Chen told a video press conference.
The site "could produce the first mobile station
sometime in 2023," she said, adding that the official decision to locate a
manufacturing plant outside China represented "an historic date for
Huawei".
Last month, the company said it would invest at least EUR
200 million and create 300 jobs to start with at the "Huawei European
Wireless Factory" in Brumath, near Strasbourg.
Located near the border with Germany, the site aims to
produce EUR 1 billion of mainly 5G equipment per year for the European market.
The Chinese group is under pressure both from accusations by
the US that its mobile network equipment is a spying risk, and charges that it
has assisted efforts by Beijing to monitor Uighur Muslims.
Huawei has rejected accusations that Beijing could access
its equipment to snoop on voice and data traffic, but an increasing number of
countries including France have restricted if not outright banned Huawei
equipment from their 5G mobile networks.