The agreement with Tesla was announced by President Manuel López Obrador. The electric car factory will be installed in Monterrey.
The American company Tesla , owned by magnate Elon Musk, will install an electric car factory in the city of Monterrey (north), with an investment of about 5 billion dollars, the Mexican government announced Tuesday.
The firm’s arrival in Mexico was confirmed early Tuesday by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who said he had sealed the agreement with Musk during a telephone conversation on Monday.
“We brought to Mexico an investment of more or less 5 billion dollars for the installation of the largest electric vehicle plant in the world,” Martha Delgado, vice chancellor for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights, later explained.
The vice chancellor traveled to Austin (Texas) to attend Musk’s announcement about his investment plan for 2023.
Tesla will be installed in the metropolitan area of Monterrey, capital of the state of Nuevo León, continually affected by water shortages, but the firm promised to consider this problem, the leftist president assured.
“This is going to mean considerable investment and many jobs,” López Obrador said at his morning press conference.
The capital that Tesla will inject will be one of the largest registered in recent years in the country, which in 2022 totaled 35,292 million dollars in foreign direct investment, according to preliminary estimates by the Mexican Foreign Ministry.
The president was emphatic on the issue of water, a chronic problem in various states in the north of the country. In 2022, the Nuevo León authorities were forced to ration the supply due to a prolonged drought.
Musk “understood the importance of addressing the problem of water scarcity (…) with the use of recycled water, water treatment even for car paint,” he said.
López Obrador, who revealed that he had already had a first talk with the tycoon last Friday, had publicly raised the possibility that the plant would be established in another region of the country with greater availability of the resource.
The concern of the Mexican government is based on the population increase that these investments could bring.
industrial pole
Tesla , which sold a record 1.31 million cars in 2022, is the most recent major automotive company to settle in Mexico , where manufacturers such as Ford, General Motors, Volkswagen or BMW already operate, producing vehicles mainly for the United States.
The companies seek access to the US market and the advantages offered by the USMCA free trade agreement between Mexico , the United States and Canada.
For this reason, many of them are located in areas close to the border such as Nuevo León, a state with a strong industrial vocation that is also home to a South Korean Kia plant.
To mitigate the problem of the lack of water, which is aggravated by increasingly extreme temperatures, the Mexican government is building a new aqueduct and rehabilitating wells to extract the liquid.
It also agreed with companies that have concessions to deliver part of the water they use.
The plant that Tesla will build adds to the 39 that the automotive sector already has in the country, including vehicle, engine and transmission factories.
In 2022, automakers produced 3.3 million vehicles and exported 2.8 million units, according to official figures.