Chicago-based Motorola Inc. plans to employ custom molders in northern Mexico to supply plastic parts for its new Mexican pager plant scheduled to open in mid-1996. The company laid the first stone last month in its US$57 million project to construct a 250,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Chihuahua in north-central Mexico.
Motorola said the plant will do no in-house plastics part molding. The company intends to use a mix of custom molders in Mexico, as well as in the United States.
The firm still is involved in a supplier ``evaluation and selection process,'' according to Inl Tomeu, spokeswoman for Motorola's Paging Products Division in Boynton Beach, Fla.
Tomeu said plastics components for the pagers to be produced at the Mexican plant will include molded housings, assemblies and shipping containers.
The facility, which will manufacture products for the growing Latin American pager market, is slated to employ as many as 1,500 within its first two years of operation.
According to the company, the number of pager users in Latin America is growing rapidly and is expected to reach one million by the end of the year.
The figure is projected to jump to 4 million pagers by 2000.
The company claims sales of about US$100 million for pagers in the region, or 80 percent of the market.
``Mexico represents one of the largest potential markets in Latin America for pagers and paging service,'' according to Fernando Gomez, vice president and general manager of the Pan American Subscriber Paging Division.
Gomez said that locating the plant in Chihuahua will make it possible for Motorola to meet the needs of the emerging market with better response time and enable the company to take advantage of a skilled local work force.
