Toyota Motor Corp. said it hasn't decided to resume building plants in Mississippi and China, after a Japanese newspaper report the automaker intends to restart suspended construction.
Toyota will restart work on a factory in Blue Springs, Mississippi, with a target of opening it by March 31, 2011, the Nikkei newspaper said Saturday, without saying where it got the information. The automaker will also lift its suspension of construction on a plant with China FAW Group Corp. in Changchun, Jilin Province, the newspaper said.
No decision on Blue Springs has been made, Mike Goss, a spokesman for Toyota's North American manufacturing unit in Erlanger, Kentucky, said in an e-mail. Tokyo-based spokesman Hideaki Homma said "nothing has been decided" about restarting work on the China plant.
Toyota, the world's largest automaker, said in December 2008 it would halt work on the Mississippi factory, where it had planned to start building Prius hatchbacks by 2010. Nikkei said the automaker has changed its plan, is restarting construction, and now intends to build 100,000 Corollas a year at the plant before adding Prius hybrids.
The automaker may be looking for a new North American source for production of the Corolla following plans to close a California plant that makes the car, and the yen's strengthening against the dollar, said Michael Robinet, an analyst at CSM Worldwide Inc. in Northville, Michigan.
Shutting the New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. factory "is part of why they might want to restart Mississippi, but they're also moving to adjust their cost footprint,?" said.
"They want to build a high-volume product like Corolla closer to their existing supply base."
Toyota had intended to use the plant in China to make Corollas, Nikkei said. It now aims to monitor demand in China before deciding what model to produce there, it said.
