Toyota Motor is expected to announce imminently plans to spend US$1bn on a car factory in Mexico.
Reuters sources said a 200,000-unit plant in the central state of Guanajuato would create about 2,400 direct jobs.
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The news agency reported in March the factory – Toyota’s first to build passenger cars in Mexico – would produce the Corolla from summer 2019, ending a self-imposed three-year freeze on new investments.
President Enrique Pena Nieto would attend an announcement in Mexico on Wednesday (14 April), the sources told the news agency.
A Toyota spokeswoman in Tokyo told Reuters nothing had been decided.
Existing Toyota operations in Mexico include a pickup truck load bed/Tacoma assembly plant in Baja California. Its just-launched Scion iA for North America is a rebadged 2 (Demio) built on an OEM basis in the new Mazda plant, also in Guanajuato.
The news agency noted Toyota president Akio Toyoda had declared a pause on expansion to ensure growth did not come at the expense of quality, after the automaker was burned by a recall crisis in 2010.
Sources have said Toyota also plans to announce a new car factory in Guangzhou, China, this week.
The planned factories in Guanajuato and Guangzhou would add up to 300,000 cars a year to Toyota’s annual production capacity, though not for a few years.
The Guanajuato factory would serve as a benchmark for other plants in the region to improve efficiency, boost productivity, and reduce costs, a Reuters source said.
Under a new framework dubbed Toyota New Global Architecture (TNGA), Toyota is overhauling the way it develops and builds cars, and has said it would reduce new factory investments by about 40% compared with pre-financial crisis levels by making production lines simpler and more efficient.
