DETROIT — Faurecia North America Inc. has received final approval to build a three-story, 278,000-square-foot North American headquarters in suburban Detroit that will house the company's administration and a technical center for its automotive seating and exteriors units.
Faurecia, the sixth-largest auto supplier in the world, will move employees to the new headquarters in Auburn Hills, Mich., upon its expected completion in the first quarter of next year. The Auburn Hills city council approved the project last night.
The French supplier announced plans last week to build the headquarters, which industry sources say will be about a $30 million development. Construction is expected to start this month, according to a news release. The building will be leased from a local developer.
The headquarters will sit on 211 acres off Interstate 75 north of Detroit and ultimately will house up to 700 employees, some of which will be new hires.
Those employees will come from Faurecia's Automotive Seating Technical Center, its Oakland Shared Services Center, and the Oakland Technical Center for Automotive Exteriors, according to a news release.
Local developers had purchased the property from Chrysler Group LLC in 2010.
"We have grown substantially, and now we are ready to extend our technical centers and headquarters operations to further support that growth," Michael Heneka, president of Faurecia North America, said in a news release.
"Our new location presents a distinctive opportunity to build from the ground up in a way that most suits our needs and to centralize our technical teams and administrative functions."
Parent company Faurecia SA, which is 57 percent owned by Peugeot, posted $6 billion in sales in 2012 and employs more than 20,000 in the United States, Canada and Mexico.
