The Financial Times reports that Tata-owned Jaguar Land Rover has, according to sources, scrapped plans for a manufacturing plant in Saudi Arabia.
The report said that the audacious plan to use locally made aluminium to manufacture premium vehicles at the heart of one of the firm's biggest sales regions at up to 50,000 units a year has been 'quietly scrapped', according to 'people familiar with the matter'.
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The reasons for the apparent collapse of the Saudi plan are unclear according to the FT, although JLR recently announced its intention to build a 300,000-units a year plant in Slovakia and is also expanding its global footprint in Brazil and China.
Analysis by just-auto suggests that the latest plant in Slovakia signals JLR's ambitions to manufacture more than one million units a year by the start of the next decade, propelling the company well out of its premium niche and into direct competition with the premium brands with the muscle that scale brings.
