Toyota Motor Co says it will expand its pickup truck plant under construction in Tijuana, boosting the economic prospects of a city that has been hurt by the flight of manufacturing jobs to Asia and weakness in the US economy.
The Japanese automaker said Friday it would boost annual production to 180,000 Tacoma truck beds from 170,000 and assemble 30,000 Tacoma trucks, instead of 20,000. It said it would begin making trucks next year instead of 2005.
Toyota said the expansion would increase employment at the plant to 780 jobs from 460. Eighty of the new jobs will be at Toyota Tsusho Corp, an import-export company and Toyota partner that will build a suppliers' park on the 700-acre site.
The US$140 million plant is small by auto industry standards but Mexican officials seized on the expansion as a vote of confidence in the country's border economy.
"I am certain that your plant will strengthen the competitiveness of our automotive industry, it will encourage the creation of jobs and international reserves, and it will have a great multiplier effect on the region's economy," Mexican President Vicente Fox said before touring the construction site.
Tijuana, even more than other cities along Mexico's northern border, has been hit hard by plant closures in recent years. Canon Inc recently moved its inkjet printer plant to Vietnam. Toy maker Hasbro Inc has moved its plant to China.
Employment at maquiladora plants -- which assemble duty-free goods for export -- fell 30 percent in Tijuana between October 2000 and last December, to about 140,000 jobs from about 200,000. The decline in maquiladora jobs throughout Mexico was a more modest 21 percent during the same time, to about 1.1 million jobs from 1.4 million.
Toyota said in last January that it would build the Tijuana plant to supply Tacoma pickup truck beds to a plant in Fremont, California, that the company operates in a joint venture with General Motors Corp. Last year, Toyota said it would also assemble some Tacoma pickups in Tijuana, its first in Mexico.
The plant will account for only 30,000 of the nearly 1.7 million vehicles that Toyota projects it will make at its six North American factories in 2006. It will also be one of the smallest auto assembly plants in Mexico, which produced 2.3 million vehicles last year.
TARIFF TRADE-OFF: Machinery exports to China dropped after Beijing ended its tariff reductions in June, while potential new tariffs fueled ‘front-loaded’ orders to the US The nation’s machinery exports to the US amounted to US$7.19 billion last year, surpassing the US$6.86 billion to China to become the largest export destination for the local machinery industry, the Taiwan Association of Machinery Industry (TAMI, 台灣機械公會) said in a report on Jan. 10. It came as some manufacturers brought forward or “front-loaded” US-bound shipments as required by customers ahead of potential tariffs imposed by the new US administration, the association said. During his campaign, US president-elect Donald Trump threatened tariffs of as high as 60 percent on Chinese goods and 10 percent to 20 percent on imports from other countries.
Taiwanese manufacturers have a chance to play a key role in the humanoid robot supply chain, Tongtai Machine and Tool Co (東台精機) chairman Yen Jui-hsiung (嚴瑞雄) said yesterday. That is because Taiwanese companies are capable of making key parts needed for humanoid robots to move, such as harmonic drives and planetary gearboxes, Yen said. This ability to produce these key elements could help Taiwanese manufacturers “become part of the US supply chain,” he added. Yen made the remarks a day after Nvidia Corp cofounder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said his company and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) are jointly
United Microelectronics Corp (UMC, 聯電) expects its addressable market to grow by a low single-digit percentage this year, lower than the overall foundry industry’s 15 percent expansion and the global semiconductor industry’s 10 percent growth, the contract chipmaker said yesterday after reporting the worst profit in four-and-a-half years in the fourth quarter of last year. Growth would be fueled by demand for artificial intelligence (AI) servers, a moderate recovery in consumer electronics and an increase in semiconductor content, UMC said. “UMC’s goal is to outgrow our addressable market while maintaining our structural profitability,” UMC copresident Jason Wang (王石) told an online earnings
MARKET SHIFTS: Exports to the US soared more than 120 percent to almost one quarter, while ASEAN has steadily increased to 18.5 percent on rising tech sales The proportion of Taiwan’s exports directed to China, including Hong Kong, declined by more than 12 percentage points last year compared with its peak in 2020, the Ministry of Finance said on Thursday last week. The decrease reflects the ongoing restructuring of global supply chains, driven by escalating trade tensions between Beijing and Washington. Data compiled by the ministry showed China and Hong Kong accounted for 31.7 percent of Taiwan’s total outbound sales last year, a drop of 12.2 percentage points from a high of 43.9 percent in 2020. In addition to increasing trade conflicts between China and the US, the ministry said
RSS