Hyundai & Kia Motor Will Be Spending $3.1 Billion In Retooling & Improving; Trump Threatened To Increase Border Tax To Cars Up To 35% Imported From Mexico
Hyundai and Kia Motors Corp. confirmed that they will be spending over $3.1 billion. The two corporations joined some other big automakers like GM, FCA, and Ford, in announcing U.S plant investments despite the threats of the President-elect Donald Trump due to higher levies on the auto imports comes from Mexico.
The Hyundai Motor group stated that they will increase their investments by 50 percent up to 3.1 billion USD that would end in five years in the U.S, according to Chung Jin-haeng, the Hyundai Motor president. The president-elect has didn't turn his attention to Kia and Hyundai, wherein it has a new plant in Nuevo Leon, Mexico that just recently building cars, Bloomberg has reported.
Meanwhile, the plan for the Mexico plant was only to specialize building small cars up until the recent slowdown of the small car sales due to consumer's change of taste as they have shifted toward the larger vehicles like the trucks, and it is where Hyundai is weak. Just recently, last month to be specific, Dace Zuchowski, the Hyundai Motor America CEO was fired due to missing sales target.
The Mexico plant was projected to build 400,000 vehicles per year but just recently, a spokesperson from Hyundai revealed that the figure of building vehicles was subject to change due to demand. Financial Times further claimed that the 3.1 billion USD investment by the company will go directly retooling the factories in the U.S will support the research for the future technologies and for self-driving cars.
Furthermore, Chung Jin-haeng revealed that the company is considering now having a new factory in the U.S to build high-demand and high-margin vehicles just like premium cars and SUVs. Though the decision was hinged whether the demand for the two brand cars will improve under the Trump administration. Trump also threatened to increase the border tax of up to 35% in cars that is imported from Mexico.
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