Kia Motors Corp. said Wednesday it has opened a new training facility in the southern U.S. state of Georgia, the first building of the company's planned US$1.2 billion automobile factory there.
Kia Motors, an affiliate of Hyundai Motor Co., is building the Georgia plant and plans to begin production there in 2009, as part of its global expansion plan.
Once completed, the Kia Motors factory in the U.S. will produce 300,000 vehicles a year at maximum capacity with 2,500 employees.
In a statement, Kia Motors President Chung Eui-sun, the son of Hyundai Motor Chairman Chung Mong-koo, said, "The quality of this training center is the best we have ever seen."
The opening of the Kia Georgia Training Center "demonstrates the commitment and effectiveness of Georgia's partnership with Kia," Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue was quoted as saying in the statement.
Last week, the junior Chung, who is widely expected to take the helm of the Hyundai-Kia auto conglomerate within years, quietly resigned as one of three co-chief executive officers of Kia Motors, in a move seen by many analysts as an attempt to save his reputation at a time when the automaker is struggling with dwindling sales, poor earnings and confrontations with its labor union.
On Tuesday, the 25,000-strong union of Kia Motors put on hold its decision to strike over the company's asset sale, after making a compromise with the management.
The union had originally planned to start an indefinite walkout from Tuesday to protest the sale of production facilities in one of its three plants at home, claiming the sale was in violation of an accord with the union.
Kia Motors, which is suffering from a chronic cash shortage, recently raised 250 billion won (US$260 million) by selling the production facilities to the local unit of GE Capital, the world's largest non-bank financial services company.
Last year, Kia Motors reported a full-year net profit of 13.6 billion won, representing a plunge of 66 percent on-year. Sales fell 8.6 percent to 15.9 trillion won in 2007, compared with 17.4 trillion won a year earlier as the company lost sales in China and other emerging markets.
For all of 2008, Kia Motors aims to sell 1.69 million vehicles at home and overseas, up 24 percent from the previous year. (Yonhap)
