Report: Subaru to raise US production from 130,000 units to 300,000 by 2016

Filed under: Plants/Manufacturing, Subaru, Earnings/Financials

Ask Subaru about the difficult car market and it is likely to ask in response, "What difficult car market?" The little Japanese brand has its XV sitting on top of sales charts in (one small corner of) Europe, the BRZ is still allergic to sitting on dealer lots, the company has raised its financial forecast due to strong US sales and being in the top five of Consumer Reports' reliability ratings is the sprinkles on the cupcake. Just-Auto now reports that Subie is considering increasing US production by 30,000 units as soon as 2014, and another 100,000 units as soon as 2016. That's good news for Subaru's Lafayette, Indiana plant, which builds the Legacy, Outback and Tribeca.

The increase in production has yet to be approved, but the company's been talking about it for a few months now, especially after it wasn't able to build a factory in China. The Chinese government denied Subaru parent company Fuji Heavy Industries (FHI) the right to build a factory in the People's Republic since Toyota, an FHI shareholder, already has two plants there. That ended up helping Subaru in the short term since it wasn't affected by the anti-Japanese sentiment over the issue of ownership of some islands in the South China Sea. In addition to the bumped-up production numbers, the president of FHI said he expects Subaru to sell more than 350,000 cars in the US next year; doing so would be an improvement of almost 30 percent over 2011.

Subaru to raise US production from 130,000 units to 300,000 by 2016 originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 27 Nov 2012 08:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://www.autoblog.com/2012/11/27/subaru-to-raise-us-production-from-130-000-units-to-300-000-by-2/

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