QUERÉTARO, MEXICO — Mexico and France plan to build a research and development center to develop new materials in Mexico, according to the French government's head of business development in the country.
Full details will be announced before the end of the year and the center will be operational within three years, said Philippe García, the French government's head of business development in Mexico.
The R&D center's work will include development of bio- and nano-technologies and even “the car of the future,” García told Plastics News, adding: “It will be a public and private sector initiative.”
“We have discussed [this] with the Mexican authorities and are entering a new economic situation,” he told delegates at a Sept. 3 aerospace conference in Querétaro. “We are working to sign an agreement and it's very ambitious.”
García is director of BusinessFrance for Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.
García said the facility probably will be in central Mexico where much of Mexico's industrial development, particularly automotive and aeronautical, is taking place.
At the same conference, organized by trade-promotion magazine MexicoNow, Jim Quick, president of the Aerospace Industries Association of Canada (AIAC) and Benito Gritzewsky , president of the Mexican Federation of Aerospace Industries (FEMIA), signed a memorandum of understanding aimed at expanding Mexico's aerospace sector.
Mexico's exports from the sector totaled $6.4 billion in 2014 and are expected to reach $7.5 billion this year, Gritzewsky said. Some 320 aerospace companies have operations in Mexico, employing 43,000, he said.
Meanwhile Celanese officially opened a technology and business center in Querétaro. It has others in Frankfurt, Germany; Shanghai, Seoul and Auburn Hills, Mich.
Todd Elliott, a vice president of the company's materials commercial organization, cut the red tape before telling Plastics News: “This is a customer experience center.”