Freightliner to Build New $300 Million Plant in Mexico

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reightliner LLC said Wednesday it will build a $300 million truck manufacturing plant in northern Mexico that will make Freightliner and Sterling trucks.

The Saltillo, Coahuila, Mexico plant “will provide additional capacity to accommodate Freightliner's long-range product planning including an expected upturn in industry demand in 2009,” the company said in a statement.

“This new facility underscores our confidence in the [North American] truck market and our bullish mid-term outlook for industry recovery post-2007,” said Freightliner LLC Chief Executive Officer Chris Patterson.

Freightliner was "frankly not able to produce what we could have sold in 2006 due to capacity constraints," Patterson said, and it expects "another surge in customer demand in 2009 prior to the next round of [Environmental Protection Agency] emissions regulations," he added.

The plant will be able to produce up to 30,000 trucks annually and employ up to 1,600 workers. Groundbreaking will be in the second quarter of 2007, with production planned to begin in early 2009, Freightliner said.

Freightliner is a unit of DaimlerChrysler AG.