Mercedez-Benz new plant in North America
By Adina Moloman
Sources: Motor Authority, Mercedez-Benz, Mexico Today
Recently o few automakers were expressing their interest in building auto manufacturing plants in North America for assembling or manufacturing their luxury segment cars, first because of to the strength of the U.S. luxury segment and second for its proximity to emerging South American markets. The demand for luxury vehicles continues to surge in many markets across the globe.
As I mentioned in an article before one of this is Audi and now Mercedes-Benz is looking to build new plant in either Mexico or the U.S.
An interesting fact is that last year, Audi overtook Mercedes-Benz as the world’s second-largest luxury car maker by sales volume. This is practically explained first by its large presence in the Chinese market and second by maintaining large sales volume in the U.S. and Europe.
The Chinese dynamic market motivates Mercedes-Benz to consider building a new plant in China to penetrate it. With this new plant and with the other that more likely will be installed in Mexico, might double their sales and reach the number of 2.7 million annual sales by 2020. That’s the global sales vision for the brand, aiming to be the world’s Number One luxury automaker according to the Mercedes-Benz CEO Dieter Zetsche.
A few auto reports indicates that the plant will be built in Aguascalientes, Mexico – next to a Nissan assembly plant that already operates as a Mexico Manufacturing Company. There are speculations that would be a joint-venture with Nissan to build the next-generation A Class and a new small model for Infiniti from 2017 or 2018 onwards.
Mexico is one of the top 10 manufacturers of cars in the world, so with this experience many others auto manufacturers are expressing their intention of opening new production plants in Mexico. Even when it’s not about manufacturing their luxury segment cars, other companies are in the process of building new auto plants in Mexico such as Honda and Mazda. The Honda plant will open in 2014 and will be located near Celaya and employ over 3,000 workers in the area, with a production for this plant of around 200,000 units annually. The Mazda auto plant will manufacture small cars including the Mazda2 and Mazda3, mostly for their distribution into Brazilian market.
