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TG Missouri will soon be making plans for expansion.
Parent company, Toyoda Gosei Co. Ltd., announced the plans in a news release last Wednesday.
“Toyoda Gosei positions North America as a key market in its medium and long-term business plan,” the news release said. “The company will continue to expand its development and production network in the U.S. in order to respond flexibly and rapidly to the needs of customers in this market.”
According to the release, the company, based in Kiyosu, plans to enhance its production capacity at its Perryville facility two other U.S. plants in San Antonio, Texas, and Lebanon, Ky.
Plans include expanding plant facilities and adding equipment “such as molding machines and painting equipment.”
The expansion news comes on the heels of another planned multi-million dollar expansion that was cancelled earlier this year.
In April, the local plant called off plans for a proposed $20 million technical expansion that encompassed another chrome facility and another paint system.
In the end, the decision to hold off came down to money and manpower.
“We got approval for the expansion in February,” said TGMO senior general manager Fred Ducharme during an interview in April, “but then we had additional costs that we ran into. We looked at the high cost of initial investment. We looked at the additional costs that came in. We looked at the shortage of labor that we’ve got and we decided that we’re going to hold off doing anything until we see what happens.”
TG Missouri, which celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2017, manages three other plants for TG USA.
Ducharme told the Republic-Monitor in April that TGMO had already been in the process of transferring some of its manufacturing jobs — some steering wheels, some driver airbags and some passenger airbags — to other plants because of labor shortages.
TGMO’s problems with manpower are a familiar refrain in Perry County, which sports one of the state’s lowest unemployment rates at just under 2 percent. Another factor is a lack of single-family housing, which prevents more people from relocating to the county.
According to the release from Toyoda Gosei, the company’s investment in expanding its U.S. production facilities will amount to a total of $60.3 million by the end of fiscal year 2021, with approximately $17 million invested in the Perryville plant.
Toyoda Gosei says the expansion comes as part of a plan to grow its North American sales of interior and exterior products by “1.3 times over fiscal year 2018 sales” to approximately $800.5 million by fiscal year 2025.
TG Missouri currently employs 2,107 people working in several different facilities comprising 921,390 square feet of manufacturing space. The planned expansion will add approximately 64,000 square feet to the plant’s 275-acre campus on Hwy. 51 in Perryville.
