Nissan Motor Co. announced plans to invest $2 billion in building a third manufacturing facility in Mexico.

The new plant in the central state of Aguascalientes will generate 3,000 jobs and spur the creation of around 9,000 other positions, Nissan's vice chairman of operations in the Americas, Bill Krueger, said.

The Japanese automaker's existing Mexican factories are in Aguascalientes and the city of Cuernavaca, south of the capital. With the third plant, Nissan's workforce in Mexico will grow to 13,500.

The new factory is scheduled to produce 175,000 small cars a year at the outset.

Construction will begin this summer and the first cars should be rolling off the assembly line in December 2013, Nissan executives said.

Nissan, which has been in Mexico since 1961, was the auto sales leader here for the third consecutive year in 2011, selling 224,509 units for a market share of 24.8 percent.

The company's two existing Mexican factories turned out 607,087 units last year, of which 411,661 were exported to the US, Brazil and other Western Hemisphere nations.

Nissan said the decision to build a third plant in Mexico is part of a strategy to expand in the Americas and follows the recent announcement of new Brazilian facility scheduled to be up and running by early 2014.

Japan's No. 2 automaker will be able to produce 1 million units a year in Mexico once the new Aguascalientes factory is operating at full capacity.

--IANS/EFE

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