Mitsubishi Buys Laguna Ford Assembly Plant
In a push to expand Southeast Asia sales, Mitsubishi has purchased a Ford assembly plant in Laguna, Philippines for an undisclosed amount.
Automotive News reports the plant, which last saw production in 2012, will start back up in 2015 with an initial capacity of 50,000 units per year, expanding to 100,000 annually. The plant will produce both the Adventure and L300 vans.
The second plant in the automaker’s Philippine portfolio, Laguna is key to underpinning Mitsubishi’s strength in the Southeast Asia market, especially in the emerging local auto market where the automaker is second to Toyota in annual sales.
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Wow! Gone part of the day and look what happens! This plant is about an hour away from our place. Nice technology park.
Back in the early 80's, I worked for a Mazda agency. One of their home market products was an appealing looking van called the Bongo. We kept agitating with the distributor to start importing it. They refused, said it wasn't suitable for the US market. A couple of years later Chrysler came out with Caravan/Voyager, and the rest is history.
I remember seeing third generation Mitsubishi Delicas filled to the gills with people and things hightailing it up Andes mountains outside Lima Peru in the early 90s. Here's a van with a 1.6 liter engine (maybe smaller) carrying nine people up a steep mountain. It made me think that Americans are such p***ies when it comes to engine size.
To be strictly accurate, that isn't the current L300 van. That's the facelift. The one they're producing now is based heavily on the pre-facelift design, which makes it cheaper to stamp out body panels and install lights: http://gomotors.net/photos/35/96/2011-mitsubishi-l300-versa-van-mt-diesel-euro-2-version-price-915000_79223.jpg?i The plant was reportedly purchased for around 10-15 billion yen, so Automotive News' sources are pretty woeful. The plant is pretty state of the art, costing around $250m when it was built, and when Ford ran it, cylinder heads were CNC-machined on the spot for cars being exported to other markets. I doubt Mitsubishi's operation will be half as sophisticated, but I don't doubt their output will be much, much higher and more profitable.