“We have many suppliers in Romania as part of the distribution network, but we do not plan to start production in Romania and we have made no decision to this end. For the moment, we’ve decided to expand car production to Mexico, the US, Brazil and China,” said Harald Kruger, a member in BMW Group’s board of management in charge of production.
In mid-May, Kruger will take over as CEO from Norbert Reithofer.
BMW Group in 2014 announced it would invest $1 billion to build a new plant that will start production in 2019 and employ around 1,500 people.
In 2012, there were rumors about a possible BMW investment in Lugoj, where the German carmaker was going to make between 100,000 and 150,000 new cars annually, and the information was confirmed at the time by Lugoj mayoralty officials.
The stake of a BMW plant, even producing as little as 100,000 cars per annum, would be exports that can go as high as over EUR4-5 billion, considering the average price of a BMW car tops EUR50,000.
BMW officials believe the efficiency of the brand’s plants is so high, that the company does not need to expand in Eastern Europe at this moment to slash workforce costs.
“Now we’re building a new plant in Mexico, where competitiveness is very high and we’ve expanded in China and Brazil. When we made these decisions, we took into account several areas where we could build plants. There are a lot of people telling us their country is the best for a BMW plant. But we made the decision taking into account all the possibilities depending on the market’s potential,” said Ian Robertson, a member of BMW Group board of management, in charge of sales and marketing.
In this context, beside investments in the plants of Mexico and Brazil, BMW also embarked upon investments in Dingolfing plant of Germany, the group’s biggest, with around 17,500 employees.
(English version by Catalina Apostoiu)